The Purpose and
Outcomes
of Youth Work
Report to the Interagency Group
Maurice Devlin and Anna Gunning
The Purpose and
Outcomes
of Youth Work
Report to the Youth Services
Interagency Group
Maurice Devlin and Anna Gunning
June 2009
PURPOSE
AND
OUTCOMES
OF
YOUTH WORK
Published by the
Irish Youth Work Press
20 Lower Dominick Street,
Dublin 1.
Tel: 01 8729933
www.iywc.com
© Copyright: Youth Services Interagency Group, 2009
ISBN 978 1 900416 72 6
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Contents
Foreword
5
Acknowledgements and Disclaimer
6
Dedication
7
1.
Introduction
8
2.
Youth Work: A Literature Review
9
3.
The Views of Youth Workers
15
4.
The Views of Young People
31
5.
Youth Workers’ and Young People’s Perspectives Compared
48
6.
Conclusion
51
References
53
Appendices
54
Appendix 1: Methodology
54
Appendix 2: Questionnaire for Youth Workers and Leaders
56
Appendix 3: Questionnaire for Young People
58
3
PURPOSE
AND
OUTCOMES
OF
YOUTH WORK
4
Foreword
The environment in which Youth Work functions is changing at an unprecedented rate. Economically we are facing
recessionary times. In policy terms we are increasingly approaching the work with an integrated and collaborative
intent. A focus on young people’s rights, equality and youth participation has become more central to our work and
there is a greater emphasis on identifying outcomes. The challenge we face, particularly in a youth service setting,
is to remain focused on the essence of youth work, while working effectively across a range of issues.
The evolution of Youth Work over many decades has brought us through numerous permutations as a sector.
With that evolution has come clarity of purpose, definition of our role and function, clear and well defined models
of practice and increased effectiveness. In short we have developed as a distinct and professional discipline with a
significant contribution to make in supporting young people through their transition to adulthood.
Youth Work is a voluntary and non-formal education process taking place in an informal setting, and as such it
has a significant contribution to make to many aspects of the lives of young people. Youth Work addresses issues of
formal education, health (including drugs, sexual health and physical well being ), community, housing, family life,
crime, employment, parenting, relationships, citizenship and many others impacting on young people.
This broad interest has created opportunities for Youth Work to collaborate with many agencies on shared
agendas but it has also brought with it an assumption by many that youth work is simply a ‘method’ of working that
can be shoehorned into work programmes that are problem focused and welfare based rather than educational,
developmental and rights based. Indeed many agencies with no background or understanding of the youth work
discipline are appointing what they call ‘youth workers’ to engage in work with young people that cannot honestly
be defined as ‘youth work’. Youth Work can contribute significantly to these shared agendas, but that contribution
will be more effective where the youth work process is understood.
It is also important to understand the contribution which volunteers make to youth work. The term youth worker
is used generically to describe volunteers, full and part time staff. Indeed volunteers far outnumber the paid staff in
our employ. Volunteerism should not be equated with amateurism however. Volunteers are subject to comprehensive
training and are expected to comply with the same standards of reflective and supervised practice as paid staff. This
amounts to a service that is extraordinarily cost effective as well as professional. More importantly, it is a service that
is driven by principle, values and commitment.
As a group of agencies working in a youth service context the Youth Service Interagency Group (YSIG) are
cognisant of the need to better articulate the purpose and outcomes of our work. We were therefore delighted when
the Irish Youth Foundation agreed to support our research initiative. Our confidence in appointing Anna Gunning
and Dr Maurice Devlin to carry out the research was well based and we are satisfied that the work contained in this
report represents a key statement on the position of youth work in contemporary Ireland.
The report considers how youth work is defined and explores the programmes and activities that contribute to
youth work practice. It addresses the informal educational nature of the work and the personal and social
development of young people engaged with. It explores the outcomes and impact of the work. It considers the youth
work process and the centrality of youth participation and the relationship between young person and youth worker
in that process and finally it explores how youth work contributes to the development of social capital. Most
importantly it illustrates all of these themes through the insightful and clear observations of young people and youth
workers.
The conclusions arrived at are unambiguous. Youth Work has a clearly defined and broadly understood purpose
and it delivers effectively on that purpose with significant impact. Our work is far from over however. These
important results can be built on further in the future, with more detailed and longitudinal studies building on our
culture of critical reflection as we continue to deliver quality, focused and effective practice in collaboration with
others.
Diarmuid Kearney
On behalf of the Youth Services Interagency Group
5
PURPOSE
AND
OUTCOMES
OF
YOUTH WORK
Acknowledgements
Youth Services Interagency Group
The Youth Services Interagency Group would like to thank everyone who has contributed to this research.
In particular we would like to thank Anna Gunning and Maurice Devlin who have produced a piece of work
which is both scholarly and accessible and which will, we are sure, provide an invaluable resource for practitioners,
managers and policy makers into the future.
We are also most appreciative of the young people and youth workers who gave so generously of their time and
insight and without whom the work would not have been possible.
Finally, we want to thank the Irish Youth Foundation for their generous financial support and encouragement to
the initiative.
Authors
The authors would like to express their sincere thanks to all the young people and youth workers, paid and
volunteer, who gave so freely of their time and participated so constructively in the research project, and the
members of the Interagency Group for their advice and support throughout the process.
They would also like to acknowledge the contribution of Orla Hill and Kathryn McGarry of the Youth Research
Programme in the Department of Applied Social Studies at NUI Maynooth for their very valuable assistance with
data input and analysis.
Disclaimer
Although every effort has been made to ensure that the information in this report is as accurate and up to date as
is possible at the time of going to print, the Youth Services Interagency Group and the authors cannot accept
responsibility or liability for any errors or omissions or outdated information.
6
Dedication
This publication is dedicated to the memory of Tony Reid, who contributed to this research as a youth work
practitioner and whose untimely passing we acknowledge with great sadness.
Tony, a dedicated Foróige Leader, had a strong commitment to Foróige and his beloved Loughglynn Foróige
Club. He was actively involved in the organisation for some twenty two years and provided strong leadership to North
Roscommon District Council. Tony firmly believed in the unique capabilities of every young person and instilled a
yes we can attitude in all those he worked with. Members and leaders alike speak of Tony with sincere respect and
admiration. He was a remarkable man who saw the best in everyone and endeavoured to develop the innate
goodness in the young people of Loughglynn.
Tony’s community spirit was one of his most endearing characteristics and through his work he instilled a feeling
of belonging to their community in the young members. He encouraged them to be actively involved in the world
around them and take responsibility for how their community develops. Tony left a strong club and a legacy of can
do attitude for which he will always be remembered.
7
PURPOSE
1.
AND
OUTCOMES
OF
YOUTH WORK
Introduction
This report presents the results of a research project commissioned by an Interagency Group comprising several of
Ireland’s largest and longest established youth work organisations: Catholic Youth Care (CYC), City of Dublin Youth
Service Board (CDYSB), Foróige, Ógra Chorcaigh and Youth Work Ireland. The research was funded by the Irish
Youth Foundation. Its key objectives were:
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To develop a definition of youth work which can reflect the common ground held by the organisations
commissioning the research while accommodating difference.
To consider how youth work and youth services relate to the work of other youth-related disciplines and services.
To identify the outcomes of youth work and recognise its boundaries.
To identify the knowledge, skills and experiences that are gained by young people through engagement in the
youth work process.
To identify what is particular about youth work’s method and approach and the relationship between this and
its outcomes.
To assess the social benefits of young people’s and adults’ engagement in the youth work process.
The research design as finally agreed by the researchers and the Interagency Group consisted of a combination of
qualitative and quantitative research in five case study sites in different locations and attached to different
organisations, supplemented by desk research into the literature (Irish and international) on the nature and
outcomes of youth work. The five case study sites were:
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Blanchardstown, County Dublin (Blanchardstown Youth Service, Foróige);
Ennis, County Clare (Clare Youth Services, Youth Work Ireland);
Loughglynn, County Roscommon (Loughglynn Foróige Club);
Rialto, Dublin 8 (Rialto Youth Project, CDYSB)
Ronanstown, County Dublin (Ronanstown Youth Service, CYC).
The qualitative research took the form of semi-structured interviews with key personnel (nine respondents in total),
focus groups with selected workers, paid and volunteer (33 in total), and focus groups with young people in each
location/group (41 in total). The quantitative research consisted of questionnaires completed in each site by paid
and volunteer youth workers (64 in total) and by young people participating (172 in total). These were not intended to
be systematically representative but rather to provide an indicative overview of some of the attitudes and opinions of
young people and adults and to generate insights and questions for further consideration. In the case of all of the
methods employed (interviews, focus groups, questionnaires) the emphasis was on respondents’ perceptions of the
nature of youth work, its purpose, benefits and outcomes. Further detail on methodology and copies of the
questionnaires are provided in the appendices.
The remainder of this report is structured as follows. Section 2 summarises the findings of the desk research into
the literature on youth work. Section 3 presents the findings relating to the views of adults, and Section 4 the views
of young people. Section 5 briefly synthesises the findings and relates them to the literature and Section 6 presents
the key conclusions arising from the research.
8
2.
Youth Work – A Literature Review
Definition
It was agreed at the outset by the Interagency Group that the definition of youth work in the Youth Work Act 2001
would provide a starting point for the research. According to the Act (S3), youth work is:
A planned programme of education designed for the purpose of aiding and enhancing the personal and social
development of young persons through their voluntary participation, and which is:
a Complementary to their formal, academic or vocational education and training; and
b Provided primarily by voluntary youth work organisations.
This definition had been designed to take into account the views of youth work organisations and interests and was
broadly in keeping with the approach to youth work taken in successive policy documents over the previous twenty
years (Department of Education, 1980; National Youth Policy Committee, 1984; Government of Ireland 1985, 1995;
NYCI, 1994). The definition stresses ‘the fundamentally developmental and educational nature of the work; the fact
that it rests on the voluntary participation of young people; and the fact that it has been, and is, in the main provided
by voluntary organisations’ (Department of Education and Science, 2003: 13).
Programmes and Activities
For many people not experienced in youth work, the term immediately suggests a certain type of activity (usually
recreational) organised in a particular type of place (a club, ‘den’ or centre). As will be made clear below, for youth
workers themselves it is at least as important how programmes and activities are facilitated and engaged in as what
the programmes and activities are or where they happen. Nonetheless, it is possible to identify in broad outline the
type of activities and programmes which young people take part in through youth work. The list below comes from
the National Youth Work Development Plan 2003–2007 (Department of Education, 2003) and it very closely corresponds
to the outline of activities and programmes included in a publication sponsored by the Department of Education
for Northern Ireland (Curriculum Development Unit, 2003). Youth work can include:
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Recreational and sporting activities and indoor/outdoor pursuits, uniformed and non-uniformed;
Creative, artistic and cultural or language-based programmes and activities;
Spiritual development programmes and activities;
Programmes designed with specific groups of young people in mind (including young women or men, young
people with disabilities, young Travellers, young lesbians, gay men or bisexuals);
Issue-based activities (related to, for example, justice and social awareness, the environment, development
education);
Activities and programmes concerned with welfare and well-being (health promotion, relationships and sexuality,
stress management), and
Intercultural and international awareness activities and exchanges.
(DES, 2003: 13).
We could add to this list more informal activities like socialising and meeting friends, engaging in conversations with
other young people and with adults in a safe and comfortable environment. Even this informality, however, does not
just happen; it needs to be planned, facilitated and managed so that young people can gain the maximum advantage
from their involvement in youth work. This means paying attention to process.
… what all of these various methods and activities share, in the youth work context, is the focus on process: on the
ongoing educational cycle of experience, observation, reflection and action, and – essential for this to happen – on
the active and critical participation of young people. The successful facilitation of this process clearly requires
substantial experience and a high degree of skill on the part of those responsible, the educators, whether paid or
volunteer (Department of Education and Science, 2003: 13).
The Personal and the Social
It is significant that the definition in the Youth Work Act uses the term ‘personal and social development’ of young
people. This suggests that youth work is concerned both with the individual young person and with her/his place in the
wider world, her/his relationship and interaction with the community and society of which s/he is a part. This is also
the view of youth work which has prevailed in Britain (not surprisingly given historical links between the two countries):
There is widespread consensus that youth work’s core purpose is the personal and social development of young people,
provided through informal education. Linked to this, its purpose is increasingly framed in terms of its contribution
to social inclusion [and] the development of social capital (Merton, 2004: 5).
9
PURPOSE
AND
OUTCOMES
OF
YOUTH WORK
Furthermore, while there are some significant differences in how youth work is perceived and provided for in
continental European countries, it seems that the twin dimensions of the personal and the social might provide a
common denominator, as the following definition from a current Council of Europe/European Commission
partnership publication makes clear:
[Generally] youth work is defined as a domain of ‘out-of-school’ education and thus linked to non-formal or informal
learning … Most definitions contain two basic orientations reflecting a double concern: to provide favourable
(leisure time oriented) experiences (of social, cultural, educational or political nature) in order to strengthen young
people’s personal development and foster their personal and social autonomy; and at the same time to offer
opportunities for the integration and inclusion of young people in adult society by fostering societal integration in
general or preventing the exclusion of disadvantaged groups (Lauritzen, 2005; ECKYP 2008).
This approach is also broadly in line with the definition of youth work in Investing and Empowering, the ‘youth
strategy’ recently published by the European Commission (2009).
Non-Formal and Informal Education: the Youth Work Curriculum?
It will be noted that the latter two quotations above introduce the related concepts of social inclusion/exclusion,
social integration and social capital. These, and the role of youth work in relation to disadvantage, will be returned
to later in this report. First some other aspects of the nature and purpose of youth work require further comment.
One is the distinctive nature of the learning and development that takes place in and through youth work. The terms
‘informal’ and ‘non-formal’ have both been introduced already. While these are different in meaning, it is important
to stress that both are relevant in a youth work context. A recent publication from the Youth Service Liaison Forum
in Northern Ireland defined them as follows:
Non-formal education refers to learning and development that takes place outside of the formal educational field, but
which is structured and based on learning objectives. This is differentiated from informal learning, which is not
structured and takes place in daily life activities within peer/family groups etc. Youth work interventions typically
result in both non-formal and informal learning (Youth Service Liaison Forum, 2005: 13).
Given the longstanding consensus that youth work is above all else a form of education, the question arises whether
the concept of curriculum, so central to formal education, is also relevant in youth work. Opinions have been divided
on this for some time, with many people rejecting the notion of curriculum as being overly prescriptive, inflexible
and inappropriate to the youth work context where the needs, aptitudes and aspirations of the individual young
person are paramount. However, a view has gained currency recently that the concept of curriculum may provide a
useful focus on the need for an overall sense of purpose and direction while still accommodating an emphasis on
the needs of the individual (such an emphasis being in fact a key part of youth work’s purpose and direction, its own
curriculum). The ‘model for effective practice’ guiding youth work in Northern Ireland adopts this approach to
curriculum, regarding it as being principally an expression of values, principles and processes and a means whereby
youth workers can communicate the nature, purpose and value of their work to each other and to external interests:
We view the term curriculum from a broader perspective [than in formal education]. In this context [curriculum] is
an attempt to identify the central elements of an educational process in a form that is open to scrutiny and capable
of being translated into practice (Curriculum Development Unit, 2003: 8).
In a similar vein, a recent text on youth work ‘process, product and practice’ in Britain provides a working definition
of curriculum as:
… the means by which the educational values, purposes, methods, processes, as well as possible outcomes [of youth
work] are made explicit (Ord, 2007: 110).
Outcomes and Impact
What might some of the ‘possible outcomes’ be? Not surprisingly, it is possible to look at them in terms of the twin
dimensions of the personal and the social already introduced. A comprehensive report commissioned by the
Department for Education and Skills in England set out to evaluate the impact of youth work provided and secured by
local youth services (Merton et al., 2004). It drew on a documentary review of fifty local services and in-depth reviews
of fifteen such services, as well as thirty case studies of practice and a survey of 630 young people who participated in
youth work. The survey findings show that young people believe youth work to have positive outcomes for them as
individuals, in terms of increased confidence and self-esteem, new friends, new skills, information and advice and
enhanced opportunities, including increased employment prospects. The interviews and case studies also provide
qualitative evidence of tangible outcomes which young people and youth workers attribute to youth work, including
10
re-engagement with formal education or reduction in drug use. In addition, the reviews and case studies demonstrate
a wider impact on young people’s relationships with local communities and with society at large.
By working with young people in schools or hospitals for example, youth workers are able to help young people to make
better use of those services; and in some cases, enable the services themselves to become more responsive, and hence more
effective, in meeting young people's needs and aspirations. There is also evidence of consequential impact upon
communities. There are examples of youth work widening the social and recreational opportunities available to young
people; mediating between different groups of young people, and between young people and local adults, leading to
impact on social cohesion; or enabling young people to influence and improve civic life (Merton et al., 2004: 8).
Further evidence of the impact and outcomes of youth work – specifically street-based youth work – are reported in
another British study entitled Reaching Socially Excluded Young People (Crimmens et al., 2004). This study used a ten
point ‘social exclusion inventory’ to identify problems addressed by youth work projects and to chart the progress
of young people over the course of their participation. The authors acknowledge the difficulty of being certain that
any improvements discerned can be attributed to youth work alone, but taken together the findings nonetheless
make a persuasive case for the positive impact on young people of involvement in youth work even over a period of
a few months.
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Almost 29 per cent were unemployed or not in education or training when the research team first visited the
project. This fell to 21 per cent at the second visit 3–6 months later.
Those with no income and not in receipt of benefits fell from 24 per cent to 20 per cent between visits.
Those deemed to be a core member of a group involved in 'anti-social' activity declined from 18 per cent to 4 per
cent (a decrease of more than three quarters).
Regular attendance and active participation in structured youth activities rose from 26 per cent to 37 per cent;
the proportion banned from youth provision dropped from 3 per cent to 0.
The numbers known to be offending diminished by almost a third, from 45 per cent to 31 per cent.
The proportion in adequate accommodation rose from 62 per cent to 68 per cent and the numbers sleeping
rough fell from 7 per cent to 1.5 per cent.
The numbers of young people maintaining contact with statutory welfare agencies over the period increased from
4 per cent to 15 per cent.
Overall, this study concluded that ‘street-based youth work with socially excluded young people does work – not
always, not everywhere, but probably more effectively than any other method yet devised for reaching these socially
excluded young people’ (Crimmens et al., 2004: 70).
A study of the benefits of the youth service in Northern Ireland provides further examples of positive outcomes
for young people in terms of both their personal and social development (Youth Council for Northern Ireland,
1998). It included a survey of more than 726 participants in 92 different youth groups which found that these groups
were identified by the young people as important providers of educational and recreational opportunities and
significant sources of information and advice on social and personal issues. Over one half of members of uniformed
groups and groups with full-time workers, and just under one third of members from groups with part-time workers,
were involved in some form of community service through youth work, a significant indication of youth work’s
broader social contribution. The groups with most opportunities for young people’s active participatory involvement
were those with a high staff-member ratio, a low turnover of staff and those which owned rather than hired their
premises. A representative control group of 82 non-members of youth groups were found to be almost twice as likely
to think that their opinions were not listened to or valued by adults (23% feeling ‘unvalued’ as opposed to 12% of
the members). Qualitative research with young people who expressed high levels of satisfaction with their youth
group membership highlighted in particular the chance to socialise and make new friends, the variety of activities,
the fun and enjoyment, the opportunities to test values and learn new skills and knowledge (something of which
members were consciously aware), involvement in decision making, exercising responsibility, and very positive,
trusting and equitable relationships with workers (YCNI, 1998).
In Scotland, youth work is regarded as one element of ‘community learning and development’ (CLD) which is defined
as having two broad sets of outcomes, closely corresponding to the dimensions identified above: personal development
and building community capacity (Communities Scotland, 2006). A recent study which aimed at ‘identifying and
quantifying the outcomes of community learning and development’ (Scottish Government, 2008) assessed the perceived
positive outcomes for 231 participants in a range of CLD settings and – while cautioning that the research findings were
subjective and retrospective and need to be augmented by other methods – the authors concluded that:
Overall, there was a positive distance travelled toward the defined outcomes by the respondents who completed the
personal development indicators. This means that CLD is supporting people to become more confident individuals,
11
PURPOSE
AND
OUTCOMES
OF
YOUTH WORK
more effective contributors, responsible citizens and successful learners. Equally, across a range of indicators, those
involved in community capacity building provide evidence of improvement in how their groups function and the
impact that this has on communities (Scottish Government, 2008a: 4).
An interesting example of an Irish study which provides quantitative evidence of the developmental outcomes of a
programme using a youth work approach is the report on the North Mayo Project run by Foróige in partnership
with three post-primary schools and with Area Development Management Ltd and Meitheal Mhaigheo.
Complementing a range of qualitative evaluation data, a standardised measure of young people’s development over
the period of a year was implemented in the form of the ‘Coopersmith Self-Esteem Inventory’ which was
administered to the 45 programme participants and to a matched control group of non-participants on a beforeand-after basis. The key finding was that the self-esteem of the participants improved by a statistically significant
amount over the course of their involvement in the programme.
At the beginning of the school year, the average self-esteem of the project participants was significantly lower than the
control group, while at the end of the school year there was no significant difference between them. As judged by the
Coopersmith Inventory, the project has had a measurable impact on self-esteem. This finding is hugely important for
the project. It is strong objective evidence to place alongside the subjective accounts of the impact of the project on the
various intra- and inter-personal and technical areas of personal effectiveness (Canavan, 1998: 28).
The significance of a research finding such as this goes beyond the benefits for the individual young people, because
research has also shown that people with higher levels of self–esteem are more likely to be active participants in and
contributors to community life and to be tolerant and sensitive to the needs and circumstances of others (see for
example Locano and Extebarria, 2007; Sotelo, 2000). Building self-esteem is therefore a prudent investment at the
levels of community and society as well as the individual.
Values
Judgments about what to invest in, whatever the nature of the investment – personal, emotional, social, financial –
are based fundamentally on values, and it is possible to make explicit some of the core values which underpin youth
work (many are implicit in what has gone before). The recently reviewed UK Occupational Standards for Youth
Work include a statement of values which can reasonably be taken to be widely shared in the youth work sectors in
both Britain and Ireland, since the review process included representation from both parts of Ireland as well as
England, Scotland and Wales, and the works referenced include Ireland’s National Youth Work Development Plan
(Department of Education, 2003) as well as the relevant British sources. These values include:
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Young people choose to be involved in youth work, not least because they want to relax, meet friends, make new
relationships, to have fun, and to find support.
Youth work starts from where young people are in relation to their own values, views and principles, as well as
their own personal and social space.
It goes beyond where young people start, to widen their horizons, promote participation and invite social
commitment, in particular by encouraging them to be critical and creative in their responses to their experience
and the world around them.
It treats young people with respect, valuing each individual and their differences, and promoting the acceptance
and understanding of others, whilst challenging oppressive behaviour and ideas.
It is underpinned by the principles of equity, diversity and interdependence.
It recognises, respects and is actively responsive to the wider networks of peers, communities, families and cultures
which are important to young people.
It works in partnership with young people and other agencies which contribute to young people’s social,
educational and personal development.
It is concerned with how young people feel, and not just with what they know and can do.
It is concerned with facilitating and empowering the voice of young people, encouraging and enabling them to
influence the environment in which they live.
It safeguards the welfare of young people, and provides them with a safe environment in which to explore their
values, beliefs, ideas and issues.
(Lifelong Learning UK, 2008)
Taken together, this list of values communicates a strong sense of the ethical dimension of youth work, its
commitment to human well-being, both at the level of the individual and of the broader common good.
12
Process, Participation and Relationships
All those with an interest in youth work – young people, parents and communities, youth workers, managers, policy
makers and funders – have a legitimate concern with establishing how effectively this ethical commitment gets
translated into practice. The examples given earlier of the quantitative evidence of the impact and outcomes of
youth work will probably not surprise those most closely involved in youth work practice, who encounter instances
of its positive effect on young people’s lives on a regular basis – this is largely why they have become involved in the
first place. It has become widely recognised however that being able to express the personal and social benefits of
youth work in a language that makes sense to people outside the immediate youth work environment is increasingly
important, all the more so in a context of straitened public finances and a heightened policy emphasis on
accountability. The challenge is to do this in a way that is authentic and that keeps faith with the principles of youth
work and the values outlined above. These principles and values demand that the informal educational dimension
is recognised as being as important as the non-formal, but as one writer has recently put it, ‘nowhere is informal
education the language of policy’:
Making eye contact, smiling or grieving can find no comfortable place within a set of directives which stress ‘life and
social skills’ and ‘sex education’. Yet youth workers want to communicate that when a young person cannot usually
smile, the mundane act of smiling becomes hugely significant. The critical interventions of youth workers can make
a mundane nothingness into something extraordinary (Spence, 2007: 8).
The ‘critical interventions of youth workers’ can only be effective if the workers – whether paid or volunteer – have
developed (through training and experience) the knowledge, skills and personal qualities to be able to intervene
appropriately: in the right way, at the right time, in the right place. As the National Youth Work Development Plan puts
it, youth work is not just a vocation, it is a profession, specifically one concerned with the facilitation of learning and
development, in other words with education. In a passage quoted earlier, the Development Plan states that:
The successful facilitation of [the youth work] process clearly requires substantial experience and a high degree of skill on
the part of those responsible, the educators, whether paid or volunteer (Department of Education and Science, 2003: 13).
A large part of the skill involved has to do with facilitating the active, constructive and critical participation of young
people in all aspects and at all levels of the work. This has been a key element of the framework for understanding
and developing youth work as far back as the National Youth Policy Committee’s report (the ‘Costello Report’) in
1984. More recently, participation is recognised as fundamental to youth work in both the Youth Work Act 2001 and
the National Youth Work Development Plan (2003). Participation is a central part of the process of youth work: it is a way
of working which allows young people to be involved in decision making and to exercise responsibility. In addition,
participation can be an outcome of youth work: because of youth work, young people may choose to participate more
actively in society, individually and collectively; and structures may be put in place whereby young people can
participate in decisions about services and policies which impact on them.
Structures are certainly an important part of participation, and without appropriate structures it is difficult to
ensure that participation formally happens; but at least as important is the nature of the relationships between the
adults and the young people because without positive relationships young people will not even want to avail of the
opportunities to participate, and their participation when it happens will not be meaningful and wholehearted.
Good relationships require that adequate space is created for the informal dimension of youth work practice, a
dimension that is sometimes difficult to quantify. Informal education is important both intrinsically for what it offers
the young person (positive feelings and enjoyment, a chance to feel good about oneself and how one relates to
others, the opportunity to care and be cared about) and instrumentally for the other things it allows to happen. This
brings us back to the point made earlier that youth work is about both non-formal and informal learning. As a recent
article in Youth Studies Ireland suggests:
… Non-formal education relies upon the informality of youth work relationships for its success, especially with those
young people who are targeted because of exclusion or disaffection (Spence, 2007: 7).
Social Inclusion and Equality
The mention of exclusion and disaffection raises the important question, touched on briefly earlier, of the extent to
which youth work is or should be regarded as (and provided as) a universal service for all young people who want it
and can benefit from it or a targeted intervention for young people who are in one way or another disadvantaged
(personally, socially, economically or educationally). Of course youth groups exist in all kinds of neighbourhoods,
communities and localities throughout Ireland, but in practice public funding to support youth work (and
specifically the employment of full-time paid workers) tends to be targeted at areas which meet certain criteria for
being classified as disadvantaged, and the Youth Work Act explicitly provides for ‘particular regard’ to be had to the
13
PURPOSE
AND
OUTCOMES
OF
YOUTH WORK
needs of young people experiencing socio-economic disadvantage. While the principle that scarce resources should
be targeted at areas of greatest need is not contested, the mechanisms for assessing need, and locating it in spatial
terms, are not as robust or discriminating as they could be. In any case, the idea that youth work is particularly
associated with disadvantage does a disservice to all young people, having the potential (at least) to stigmatise those
who take part in certain types of project or programme, and lessening the chances of others to be exposed to
opportunities and experiences from which they, and their communities, could benefit. The National Youth Work
Development Plan itself makes a strong statement about this matter and its relationship to general public perceptions
of young people.
The view of young people, and of youth work, which underlies [the Plan] is an unequivocally positive one. Young
people are not a ‘problem’ to be solved, any more or less than adults; and youth work is not primarily about solving
social problems. It is rather about adults and young people working together to further personal, community and
social development. Given this positive orientation, it follows that youth work should be regarded as something from
which all young people can benefit, rather than a remedial service for those whose needs are not being met otherwise.
It also follows that an investment in a comprehensive youth work service is an investment in a better future for society
as a whole (Department of Education and Science, 2003: 14).
This last point makes it clear that youth work at its best is socially inclusive in a number of related senses. As the
framework of values presented above makes clear, it should be open to all young people, should promote equality
and should not discriminate unfairly against individuals or groups. Of course like other ‘goods and services’ as
defined under the Equal Status Acts 2000 to 2004, youth work must not discriminate against any young person or
adult on any of the nine equality grounds (gender, religion, ‘race’ and ethnicity, membership of the Traveller
community, disability, sexual orientation, family status, marital status, age). However, the commitment to equality in
youth work is not simply a matter of adhering to legal requirements. The National Youth Work Development Plan set out
to uphold the provisions of the equality legislation ‘in spirit as well as in letter’ and presents a vision of youth work
‘which values diversity, aims to eradicate injustice and inequality, and strives for openness and inclusiveness in all its
dealings with young people and adults’ (Department of Education and Science, 2003: 15).
A review of contemporary youth work literature suggests that as well as promoting equality youth work should
also facilitate young people collectively – again, all young people, not just some – to contribute to social development
and positive social change. This too has been recognised as an important part of youth work’s purpose since the
National Youth Policy Committee’s report more than a quarter of a century ago:
If youth work is to have any impact on the problems facing young people today then it must concern itself with social change.
This implies that youth work must have a key role both in enabling young people to analyse society and in motivating and
helping them to develop the skills and capacities to become involved in effecting change (NYPC, 1984: 116).
Social Capital
A further, related sense in which youth work is socially inclusive is that it provides particularly rich possibilities for the
development of social capital. A very influential idea in contemporary social policy, social capital has been defined by
its best known advocate as ‘the features of social life – networks, norms and trust – that enable participants to act
together more effectively to pursue shared objectives’ (Putnam, 1995: 664–65). Youth work might be said to rest above
all on the building of positive ‘networks, norms and trust’ among young people and – vitally – between young people
and adults. It therefore provides abundant opportunities for the development of intergenerational solidarity, a form
of social capital which is particularly important to sustain at a time of rapid change and instability and one which will
become even more significant in the years ahead when intergenerational tensions are likely to intensify as fewer
people work and more require care. This was recognised in the National Youth Work Development Plan.
While Ireland has … in proportional terms … a larger youth population than the European average, it shares in the
longer-term trend towards an ageing of society as a whole. However, this does not in any respect lessen the importance
of effective and adequately-resourced youth work provision. Quite the contrary: the need for social cohesion, stability
and equity in the future, when the dependency ratio will be substantially greater than at present (i.e. the numbers of
‘economically active’ will be proportionally much lower) makes the social, civic and political education of young people,
in formal and informal settings, much more important, not less (Department of Education and Science,
2003: 2).
14
3.
The Views of Youth Workers
This section will present the views of youth workers, paid and volunteer, about the nature, purpose and outcomes of
their work. In the case of the qualitative data, emphasis will be placed on the words of the workers themselves.
Names, when given, are pseudonymous (except for those of the researchers/interviewers). Only where it is thought
relevant will particular characteristics or attributes of the speakers or respondents be pointed out (for example
gender or age, voluntary/paid status, type of group or area). Quantitative findings drawing on the questionnaire
survey are in most cases summarised in diagrammatic form. It is important to emphasise – as stated in the
introduction and detailed in Appendix 1 – that the surveys of youth workers and young people were based on ‘nonprobability’ sampling and do not claim to be representative of youth work in Ireland.
The Purpose of Youth Work
While the precise words used varied, there was virtual unanimity within the focus groups that the key purpose of
youth work is primarily educational and developmental. It might be suggested that the ‘dominant discourse’ of
youth workers, when they are asked spontaneously to identify the purpose of their work, is personal development
within a community context. This worker’s view was not untypical:
One thing I hold dear is the sense of our mission or our purpose. That to me is the point I bring most people back to
about what we’re doing, what we’re trying to achieve … enabling young people to develop themselves and contribute
to the development of their communities.
Responses to the open-ended questions in the questionnaire survey (as interpreted and analysed by the researchers – see
Appendix 1) confirmed the primacy of personal development but also the recognition by workers of a range of other
dimensions to youth work’s purpose, including the building of positive relationships, caring for young people, giving
them opportunities for association and developing the community. As Figure 3.1 shows, the personal development
dimension featured in more than half of the responses when youth workers were asked to complete the statement
‘In my own opinion, the key purpose of my work with young people is …’. There were however some interesting
differences relating to the status of the respondent as a full-time paid, part-time paid or volunteer worker. Among
volunteers, as Figure 3.2 shows, there was a more even distribution between the most commonly mentioned
categories, with association and caring for young people being the two most commonly mentioned and personal
development in third place.
Percentage of respondents
60
53
50
40
28
30
19
20
10
9
22
22 23
20
11
11
3
9
3
6
8
Pe
rs
on
al
de
ve
Pa lopm
rt
e
O icip nt
pp a
or tion
As tuni
so tie
ci s
at
io
n
Ed Ski
l
Re uc ls
a
Ad lati tio
ul ons n
tt h
ra ip
ns s
Di itio
ve n
rs
io
n
C C
om a
r
So
m e
ci Ci un
al tiz ity
en en
ga sh
ge ip
m
Ac en
tiv t
iti
e
O s
th
er
0
Response categories (more than one response possible)
Figure 3.1: The key purpose of my work is …
15
PURPOSE
AND
OUTCOMES
OF
YOUTH WORK
Percentage of respondents
80
70
60
50
40
30
20
10
0
Full-time
Part-time
Volunteer
Status of worker
Personal development
Association
Participation
Skills
Opportunities
Education
Relationships
Adult transition
Diversion
Care
Community
Citizenship
Social engagement
Activities
Other
Figure 3.2: Key purpose by status of worker
These findings may be compared with the responses given when youth workers were presented with a fixed range of
options for identifying the purpose of youth work (as opposed to being asked an open-ended question). A separate
question in the survey listed ten statements of possible aims of youth work and asked respondents ‘how much
importance would you attach to each of these aims in your own work?’, on a scale ranging from ‘none at all’ to ‘a
great deal’. The full list of statements can be consulted in Appendix 2. For the purposes of analysis the ten can be
categorised here under five broad headings. In many ways these headings correspond to the ‘sociological models of
youth work’ outlined by Hurley and Treacy (1993), based in turn on the framework of Burrell and Morgan (1979)
for understanding models of education – except that an additional category (care and welfare, the second below) is
included. The headings are:
G
G
G
G
G
Traditional (‘character-building’) aims.
Aims focused on the care and welfare of young people.
Personal development aims.
Social education aims.
Aims concerned with promoting social change.
Figure 3.3 shows that personal development aims receive the highest scores (the mean score for each category is
indicated, the closer the bar being to ten the more popular the aim). Whatever the status of the worker (volunteer,
part-time paid and full-time paid) personal development aims score the highest (with means of more than nine in
each case), but all four other types of aim also receive high scores, especially among volunteer workers. Taken together the
findings appear to confirm the view that youth workers see the personal development of young people as the key
purpose of their work but in a context where other aims are also important.
16
9.7
10
9
8.3
8
Mean score
7.6
8.5
8.1 8.2
7.9
7.1 7
7
6.4
6.86.6
7
9.5
9.3
6
5
Full-time
Part-time
4
Volunteer
3
2
1
ha
ng
e
at
io
n
al
So
ci
al
Ed
C
uc
en
t
So
ci
Pe
r
so
na
l
De
ve
lo
pm
e/
ar
C
Tr
a
di
W
el
fa
re
tio
na
l
0
Response categories
Figure 3.3: Perceived importance of youth work aims by status of worker
Universal Benefit of Youth Work
It is important to note that in discussing the purpose of youth work, responses tended to focus on the educational
and developmental benefits for young people in general rather than for particular target groups. The prevailing view
was that youth work is equally relevant for all young people regardless of socio economic status, although there was
also a recognition that funding is currently not adequate to reach out to all young people who wish to participate.
The following quote reflects a common perception among the workers.
And then there’s pressure on us to go into the other direction in the other part of [the community], where there is a
huge youth population, but it’s not a disadvantaged area. Sometimes I think that’s a problem for youth work, it’s
become ghettoised, it’s become seen as a response to [the] disadvantaged.
The definition of ‘disadvantage’ was also an issue for respondents. The focus on socio-economic disadvantage - while
important in terms of recognising and responding to material inequalities – was seen by many to limit the potential
for youth work to reach out to all young people.
And I also think, we would find an awful lot of youngsters who are supposedly quite advantaged, in serious crisis
in their lives, seriously lacking skills around communicating, around expressing their needs and concerns,
youngsters who are self-harming because they don’t have a way in which to talk about what is going on in their lives.
I know we do prioritise communities where there is a greater need, but we do recognise that any youngster can benefit
from youth work service.
It was suggested that a mix of social backgrounds within youth groups was inherently beneficial for young people
and also can have advantages from the worker's point of view.
...yeah, in terms of the make up of the group and the risk levels, so you can counterpoint things and you can
manage it differently, because if you’ve too many of the same [issues or problems] it is counter productive, it’s very
difficult to manage, it’s just so difficult to manage.
The issue of the benefits of diversity within youth groups will be returned to later in this section.
17
PURPOSE
AND
OUTCOMES
OF
YOUTH WORK
Starting from Needs, Discovering Potential
Returning to the focus group discussions, it is clear that the individual young person is regarded by youth workers
as being at the heart of the work they do. The starting point is to recognise young people’s needs and their
possibilities for growth and to value the fact that they have voluntarily entered into the youth work relationship with
empathetic and supportive adults:
Mary
I think while you’re encouraging them to take a lead in their own development, they are the
core person and it’s about them at the end of the day.
Joan
But they are responsible for their own lives.
Mary
They choose to turn up every week and it’s up to us then to try and help them achieve
whatever they want to achieve and try to meet the needs that they have.
This requires an openness on the part of the youth workers to what the young people will make of the opportunities
they are offered.
You want to give the young people the opportunities and information that they can have a better life that they don’t
have to accept what’s there. It’s giving them the information, provide them [with] the skills to make new decisions,
to look at new opportunities. Each of our groups go, in a way, where the young people take you. We don’t go in and
say I want to do A, B and C with this group and I want these outcomes. It’s very hard to predict some of the outcomes
that your groups are going to have. You might have a certain idea in your head and all of a sudden you have to go
this way and that way. I suppose it’s the needs of the young people have to be priority and that they take very quick
ownership of the group and they bring the group where they need it to go.
In allowing young people the space to ‘bring the group where they need it to go’ it is very important to recognise
that each of them is starting from a different point, and each will have different potential. Even enabling them to
begin to think in terms of their own potential may be a very significant outcome.
Kay
It depends on the starting point as well, where they’re at when they come in. For some, they
may be more advanced and will end up on the Board of Directors, for others, just to be
turning up and starting to participate and engage with leaders and youth workers, that would
be an outcome. It does depend on that.
Anna
More like a potential, an individual reaching their potential?
Kay
Yeah. Actually, if you had a youngster who is concerned with their potential, I think you have
achieved a huge amount, as opposed to just drifting through life …
The Group as a Resource
Most youth work takes place in groups of one kind or another and the collective dimension is seen as very important
by workers: the group is itself a resource, a means through which young people can develop new skills and qualities.
However it must be small enough, and meet frequently enough, for the workers and the young people to get to know
each other as individuals (and of course that has resource implications).
I think when you have smaller groups as well and you’re seeing them maybe twice a week or three times a week, you’re
able to build up that relationship and you might take a long time for them to trust you, but you might be the only
significant person in their lives and I suppose building up to that stage when you have that trust.
Relationships
This raises the vital issue of relationships and their centrality to the youth work process. Time and again this was
highlighted by respondents.
I mean it’s primarily about relationship right, I’m fed up listening to myself saying this but I am totally convinced
of the relationship and of how central and important it is to young people buying in and getting involved. It’s about
opening up all sorts of conversations with them without any obvious conclusion to them only that you’re interested
and it’s the interest and the relationship that I think is the thing that actually gets work done and once you have the
relationship you can generally do whatever you like.
18
The findings suggest that youth work rests on the simultaneous operation of multiple different types and levels of
relationships. One is the relationship of the young people to the adult workers, who may be the only adults outside
their own families (or unfortunately in a small number of cases even including their own families) with whom they
consistently engage in constructive and positive interaction.
We are also an adult with a listening ear and that’s something, besides their family member who could be too busy
in a lot of cases today. We are an adult … who they can bounce things off and we’re not going to say ‘that’s a terrible
idea, that’s a dreadful idea, but if you want my opinion, do you want to hear mine, this can happen, that can
happen’. So I think we are a listening ear.
Youth work also facilitates the development of positive relationships between young people themselves, within the
peer group or across different age groups, where the model of the youth worker-young person relationship can act
as an example.
[The] youngster has an experience of having been met by an adult who will actually sit and listen to them, who will
respect them for who they are, who will accept them for who they are and who will offer them an opportunity to
whatever, be heard, get involved in activities. We would have a strong tradition of organising summer camps for
younger children, it’s the only thing we do with pre-teens, the only reason we do it is that the older teenagers work as
volunteers on the programme. For a lot of young people it’s the first time they experience that level of responsibility,
where they are responsible for looking after 9–13 year old children.
A further dimension is the way in which young people have the opportunity to observe positive relationships between
adults or within adult groups, and – most importantly – adults have the opportunity to have positive experiences of
young people. This can have a very important knock-on effect on local intergenerational relationships and
community spirit – significant elements of social capital as discussed earlier.
It’s part of their lifestyle here to come in and the familiarisation with staff who have been here for a long time and
everybody is on first name terms … there is always a little bit of a laugh going on here with the staff … young people
just love coming in and seeing what’s going on. They hear the laughter so it feels happy to them.
Another worker summed up the multiplicity of the relationships at play as follows:
They get important social skills developed inside the youth club because they are with their own age group, they are
with the members, the senior members, the leaders, they are kind of speaking to all different age groups, they are
speaking to their own age, younger age[s], their peers, older groups, so there is more confidence there.
Participation and Empowerment
It is clear that the youth work relationship is different from the type of institutional relationships between young
people and adults which prevail in most other settings. It is an explicit part of youth work’s concern as described by
these workers to facilitate the active engagement and participation of young people, to promote their empowerment
and the development of a sense of working together as partners. Of course this has also been an important policy
aim in youth work for many years: the White Paper published to mark the UN International Year of Youth in 1985
was titled In Partnership with Youth (Government of Ireland, 1985). One of the focus group participants was a former
teacher who thought that his own approach to working with young people was very different in the youth work
context.
[As a teacher] … I used to take a lot of sport, take the kids away on trips, all sorts of trips, field trips or whatever it
was. Then I realised that … although I got on better with the ones that I had spent more time with outside the
classroom – that’s natural isn’t it – we were still the boss, in all these situations. You still had the power thing, it
was totally different and it was very much on my terms.
Another participant who also had experience both of youth work and formal education made a similar point.
The big difference between the teacher relationship and the leader relationship is the leader is encouraging a member
to take control, they want them to take control … of the situation and handle the situation and they are just there to
support them, to just point out something that is going on that maybe they don’t see. You were asking about what
they’ve got from it … For me, observing members, I would say the one big thing I see and you can actually see it
happening as the year goes on, the way they can speak …
19
PURPOSE
AND
OUTCOMES
OF
YOUTH WORK
Developing ‘the way they can speak’, giving young people a ‘voice’, is an important aim and an explicit principle of
youth work in Ireland (Department of Education and Science, 2003). This means that constructive challenge from
young people to adults is to be encouraged, just as they should find their relationships with youth workers
challenging in a constructive way.
You know young [name] … she is quite an intelligent young person, beautiful, quiet, very, very quiet girl, she was
with us for fifteen months, coming every week to the club, getting involved, very quietly, speaks very gently. One day
I said something and her whole body language, she sat up in the chair and she took me on and I said thank you
God. She said ‘I hope you’re not offended?’ I said no, you’ve just made my day! All of a sudden she felt that she could
challenge, at last … she had all the skills, but she needed the permission nearly, to take on an adult.
Attitudes and Values
This approach to relationships, participation and empowerment reflects the fundamentally positive attitudes of
youth workers to young people. This too is in keeping with the policy position: the previous section quoted the
National Youth Work Development Plan which was based on an ‘unequivocally positive’ view of young people and youth
work. ‘Young people are not a “problem” to be solved, any more or less than adults; and youth work is not primarily
about solving social problems’ (Department of Education and Science, 2003: 14). This view is not always widely
shared outside youth work, and changing attitudes to young people at community level and in society more generally
is part of what youth work sets out to do.
A lot of the young people we work with would be viewed in a particular light. A lot of the work is with the most at
risk, [but] not all of it. The young people are viewed in a particular way at times within the community. A lot of the
work we do has been about how those young people find their voice and then feed back in a positive way what it’s
like to be them, in their own community.
This positive attitude is reflected in youth work’s ‘open door’ policy, its determination to create space for young
people and to continue to try to engage with them even when there are difficulties.
I think the door is always open here in some sense and that’s not like some kind of fairytale, it doesn’t mean it’s not
hard, that the struggle and the conflict is not very difficult sometimes, because it is, but the door still needs to remain
open and negotiations need to be able to happen. I think for some young people in schools, rule breaking is very black
and white and maybe there are particular judgements that are attached as well for young people, like where they’re
from or the type of behaviour or family that has gone before. The base here for us is to try not to do that, it’s trying
to do something different, it’s trying to negotiate in a different way with young people.
Attitudes are closely related to values and for some workers the core values have a faith dimension.
I suppose the underpinning [value] is the passion for young people and to see young people doing well, I think that
is common across the youth service. I suppose the approach is how you treat people, probably, I would have to say
there is a Christian approach here, I won’t say a Catholic approach but there is definitely a Christian approach here
… I suppose you are looking at young people and you want the best for them.
Taking Time
It follows from all that has gone before that for youth work to be successful, sufficient time has to be allowed for
relationships to develop and for growth and development to take place.
… in my experience I get a lot of particularly vulnerable young people, they come in and they have very little selfconfidence, they have very little attention span, very little want or need, they think, to learn. So it takes a lot of time
to actually build them up to the stage where they are actually achieving things and recognising their achievements.
Once you see them actually doing that and once you see their faces, when something clicks and they realise, God, I’ve
done this myself, I never thought I could do this, it’s just that glimmer.
There were numerous references in the focus groups to the need for patience and the importance of recognising
that while there are often valuable outcomes for young people in the short term, more profound benefits can often
take years to emerge.
I mean [it’s been] four and five years and some of them now are coming through as leaders, when you really feel a
huge shift, a huge change, really measurable change, but that’s over a period of time of them buying in as children.
It’s over a long time, there are a lot of highs, a lot of lows as well within that and they’ve worked with different youth
workers and very strong relationships with the youth project …
20
Workers in one project spoke about a young person whose behaviour had been particularly challenging and who
would have been ‘given up on’ long ago in most other settings. Eventually, and just recently, they had seen a
breakthrough.
Clare
I would have started about ten years ago in the homework club and he was extremely
challenging as a child then. It’s been a really intense long road with him and workers at a
different point have had intense contact with him through different processes and [name]
would have done a lot of work with him around the group that went on an exchange … .
I would say that he really pushed boundaries, he really pushed boundaries with us, he really
tested us, up to last year, up to this year.
Sean
If he had been in school, he would have been expelled twenty times over, no problem.
In another project the entire approach is based primarily on long-term group work with young people, although
different staff might be involved at different stages. This has the added benefit that young people are having positive
relationships with a wider range of adults.
We don’t run short pieces of work, or at least we try not run short pieces of work, because the value of them is limited.
Sometimes you might work with a group, for us a short piece of work might be two years, but we would have other
histories where we are working with groups of young people in a much longer context. It might not be necessarily the
same staff that work with them, they could pass through a variety of types of groups here, which means that their
involvement in the service here could be ten years, fifteen years.
As a result of this intensive engagement over time between young people and the workers, the youth group often
comes to hold a special significance for the young people in the long term, and it can continue to be a source of
support and guidance even after they have stopped being a regular participant or ‘member’. The following is just
one of many such examples which were cited in the focus groups.
We would certainly try to create an environment where anyone at any age could come back in, whether they were older
or young, whether it’s a year gone or five years gone. We had a youngster come back to us recently who must be twenty
seven and had a very difficult relationship with his father, but hadn’t spoken to anyone about it. Since he was a
teenager he was getting help from us but his father died and he just hit a complete [ ] and he rang one of us and
said ‘Can I come for coffee, I need to talk?’ Not been here, not been inside the door for at least five years, the guy is
well into his twenties, but just needed to get over that. He actually needed to go for bereavement counselling, but we
were able to … we are not necessarily the answer, but we can help somebody work out what it is they need …
Outcomes: Positive Feelings
The young man in the example just given had gained something lasting and invaluable from his involvement in youth
work – a sense of confidence that there were people who would be there to support and comfort him in difficult times.
Emotions and feelings are difficult to quantify but they are an unmistakable part of all social life and they play a vital
role in youth work. As long ago as 1980, in his influential publication Creators Not Consumers: Rediscovering Social
Education, Mark Smith highlighted the importance of positive feelings, alongside knowledge and skills, as part of the
personal attributes which youth workers are attempting to enable young people to develop. Furthermore, because of
the absence of a formal curriculum based on syllabi and precisely measured individual performance leading to a
situation where there must inevitably be ‘winners’ and ‘losers’, youth work allows for attention to the feelings of the
individual young person to an extent to which formal education never can. There were many examples of this given
in the focus groups, including one of a young man who had a very negative experience of formal education but was
given the opportunity to ‘shine’ within the youth work context because the workers allowed him to demonstrate his
expertise in fishing, and to act as a guide for the adults and other young people on a fishing trip.
In the lunchtime club [we had] a slot where people got to show their skills, that they never got a chance when they
were in school. [Name] was an example of that … he was a walking demon in school … He went through that whole
process [of a fishing demonstration] and it was a huge turnaround for him, because he then suggested, in his
evaluation, that the … group should go for a fishing day … and of course he was ‘cock of the walk’ because he caught
everything, we caught nothing.
21
PURPOSE
AND
OUTCOMES
OF
YOUTH WORK
Outcomes: Positive Experiences
The youth workers in all the case study sites highlighted the importance of creating opportunities for young people
to have a good time, to enjoy themselves and take part in activities that make them feel good about themselves. This
in itself is an important outcome.
David
[about an awards event] It was terrific, the whole thing was just terrific.
Ann
The smiles on the young people’s faces, they will go up and tell you everything about their
club. It’s great.
Ciara
It’s great for getting them to reflect, it’s not just about the end product, it’s the process
as well, for them to come out and actually say what benefits they have gained from doing
the project.
Outcomes: Positive Behaviour
Placing an emphasis on positive feelings and on positive experiences means that workers are also encouraging and
reinforcing those aspects of young people’s behaviour which are positive, and obviously thereby discouraging
negative behaviour, including anti-social behaviour but also behaviour which is harmful or damaging to the self.
[S]ome young people might come in and their behaviour might be quite challenging and they take over the group and try
and … sabotage the group … then you might notice, it could be a year later, it could be only a few months later, that they
start maybe not to do that and to participate more and stuff. I think that’s a result for that person, that they have learnt
to look at their behaviour and manage it and change it in a way that is beneficial to them. They might be able to come in
and say, rather than coming in shouting and screaming, they might be able to say, I’m not in good form today … I know
they are quite small [outcomes] and they are very hard to put down on paper, but I think that is a huge thing.
There were other similar examples of young people becoming more reflective and ‘self-conscious’ of how their
behaviour impacts on themselves and on others. One young man who was training to be a leader was able to look
back and think about his own negative behaviour and relate that to how he would go about working with young
people himself.
[Name] is doing his junior volunteer [programme] now … and he was really nervous. I was talking to him about
it and he would have been a very angry young man and he [used to] lash out really, really badly, just verbally. We
were sitting down and he was telling me he was nervous about working with young people that are like that. But he
was able to say, I think what I’ll do is lower my voice tone because I know … if people shout at me, and they used to
shout at me, I get louder and louder, so I’m going to try and [change] that. For him to say that.
Outcomes: Positive Influences and Social Integration
The importance of relationships has already been stressed above. These include relationships with others (both
adults and other young people) whom the young person might not otherwise know or have significant contact with,
and they can be an important source of positive influence.
[One young man] also developed a group of friends which he probably wouldn’t have made friends with [otherwise]
and they were from his area. They were from much more stable families and probably if it had been a different
environment I would say their families would have been reluctant to allow their kids to involve themselves with this
young lad. He had all the look of the troublemaker on the street, this fella had. He is still involved. The [centre] has
been refreshed. He was involved in the re-fitting out of it and came down voluntarily. He calls in to check in with
us and he’d chat away. He’s now doing an apprenticeship in plumbing …
Workers also gave examples of how young people from different areas, neighbourhoods or social classes were
coming together in the youth group in a way that did not (and would not) happen otherwise.
Then there is some people in the community who will say ah well you only work with the hooligans and thugs. Or other
people who will say well you work only with the kids from the posh area. And we do have a really good mix of youngsters
on a lot of the projects. Which I think has real benefits for both. I think the fact after a night here you’d be dropping a
kid into a local authority estate and back out to a posh house, the fact that they’ve come together and been friends. They
will only get that experience here because they won’t get it in school or in any of the other social groups they are likely to
be doing.
22
Outcomes: Learning from Experience
Related to the point made earlier that there is no formal ‘passing’ or ‘failing’ in youth work programmes is the
overall emphasis on learning by doing or ‘experiential learning’. This means that all experiences are looked at
positively as providing opportunities for experimentation and reflection. Evaluation is an integral part of the
process, regardless of the precise nature of the activity or programme.
One very important thing I’ve learnt over the years in the club is, no matter what they actually go to do, it is never
going to be actually wrong, they would learn, something mightn’t turn out right, but they learn if they don’t do their
jobs right, as a group they’ve learned from the evaluation.
Outcomes: Skills
It has already been shown that youth workers seek to promote the active involvement of young people in decisionmaking. This is just one of the ways in which youth work can facilitate young people to learn new skills which are
transferable to other areas of their lives or which they can use subsequently in work, training or education. A youth
club leader had seen this many times when he spoke to young people about their experience of school or,
afterwards, third-level education.
I’ve known ex-members who are involved in societies in college who were amazed at how lacking in skills their peers
were when it came to organising. I’ve heard youngsters in Leaving Cert and fourth year saying that when it came
to organising a trip, they were nearly taking the job from the teacher and then realising, oh we’re not organising it,
someone else is. It was alien for them that somebody was doing the stuff. The motto [here] has always been ‘Never do
for members what they can appropriately do for themselves’.
Outcomes: Qualifications
Youth workers can always offer encouragement to young people in their educational careers but increasingly they
are also exploring ways in which they can become more directly involved in supporting and enabling young people
to acquire qualifications. In one project young people who were alienated from the school system (in some cases
actually expelled) were being given the chance to study for formal state examinations in the centre itself and there
were some notable success stories.
We were doing Art with this young fella [name]. He refused to draw. He was going to the museums et cetera. Had
the theory. He was doing a practical. We got around him and said draw. He dug the pen into the paper. We said
you’ll have to just let the pen go. And he started to draw. And for a week he had to draw every day. The intensity of
that tuition. He got a C in Art in the Leaving Cert.
There are numerous other ways in which youth workers help young people to gain qualifications, including liaising
with businesses and other organisations to seek funding and other support.
We’re going through a good patch now, especially with the … fund in the area here that we are involved in where
anyone who goes on to what we call ‘real’ third level, as opposed to PLC, will get a grant and we just give it out
every year in September.
The importance attached by the respondents to working closely with other agencies and orgnisations will be
returned to later in this section.
Outcomes: Jobs
Directly related to their support for young people in gaining qualifications, youth workers were able to point to
examples where it was clear that their involvement with the youth club or project had an important impact on the
young person’s choice of occupation, or the occupational choices which became open to them.
Paul
We’ll have our few doctors and solicitors very shortly.
Liam
We have our first ever teacher in the area.
Paul
Yeah the change in the place here, I’ve lived here since 1977, I’m a long, long time here and
now at this stage we have something like four or five young people are in the Gardai, which
would have been unheard of. So something is happening, in spite of all the negative stuff,
there is something happening.
23
PURPOSE
AND
OUTCOMES
OF
YOUTH WORK
Outcomes: Families
So far attention has focused on the beneficial outcomes for the individual young person. But youth work can also
have a direct and indirect positive impact on the family life of young people.
It’s also the effect that they have on their own families, its not just them, but whatever experience they have on one of
the projects, they go home and something is said that can influence the people who are surrounding them, a chain
reaction that we can never put numbers on or put in a report at the end of the year.
Furthermore, through their involvement in youth work the adults themselves, whether they are paid workers or
volunteers, may find that their own approach to family life and their relationships with their children may change
for the better.
One example, a parent who is a leader as well, said prior to becoming a leader herself if there was a phone call to be
made on behalf of their child, they would be running out to do it, whereas now she’d be saying, go over there now
and ring up and get the number and do all that yourself. Prior to that, she said she would have done all of that for
them. There is a big tendency with parents to do too much for their children. She said because she had the experience
of the club she would be much more aware of getting them to do what they can for themselves, rather than do it
for them.
It appears therefore that youth work has the potential to have positive outcomes for whole families and not just for
the young people who take part.
Outcomes: Communities
Beyond the level of the individual and the family, youth work can have a positive impact on community life. Often
the youth club or project was the only example people could call to mind of a community initiative involving people
of different age groups.
You can see the benefits as well in the community, young people will involve themselves more within the community
and getting involved. I have a group that are getting involved, off their own bat, with a gardening initiative with
adults from the community. If there wasn’t a youth project there to facilitate that, would you have these young people
coming along and taking that much of an interest in their own community?
Community integration is also facilitated by the involvement of local community members in the management and
governance of the projects.
[The management model] allows the people sitting around the table, who are from the local community and from the
other agencies to discuss, to talk, to debate, to actually develop strategies and to … influence what’s actually
happening in the project, as opposed to just look after the bank account and look after the reports back to the
Companies Office or whatever it might be. It’s an interesting model I think.
Related to the points made earlier about time, in cases where a youth project or centre has been in existence for
many years, it may have become a defining part of the community’s very identity.
We are very lucky that the centre is twenty four years in the community, so all the young people we work with, say
maybe their mothers or aunties or uncles have come through the use of the centre, so if the kids are here ’til 11 o’clock
at night, the parents don’t have a problem … I think the centre in itself, I know it’s a youth service, but it is also
community based in that you have parents and grannies and everyone coming in with every problem that isn’t youth
service based. They would come in with lost cats or anything …
Outcomes: Improving Local Conditions and Services
An important part of the local community dimension is the fact that the youth project and its workers are very often
to the fore in identifying local needs and problems and working with other groups and agencies to develop
responses, or in some cases even being instrumental in setting up additional agencies and organisations if necessary.
In this way they play a significant leadership role in local and community development.
Everything which has been set up since [twenty years ago], the youth project has been instrumental. Whether that
was the the youth initiative, the information centre, the family centre. The youth project always did [the] work
around these issues. Did some family support when there was no family support.
24
The Non-formal/Informal ‘Curriculum’
Just as the literature review identified some differences of opinion regarding the role of curriculum in youth work
and indicated that often the differences are in fact about terminology rather than principles, the focus group
participants tended to take the view that whatever term is used the important thing is to acknowledge the distinctive
nature of youth work and that it is about both non-formal and informal education. This means that a youth worker
never stops looking for opportunities to facilitate learning and development for young people.
You don’t become a classroom. A lot of youth work has gone that way. Curriculum based. I’m not against
curriculum. But I am against it when it becomes so regimented that you don’t talk to young people from that group
if you aren’t in that group. That destroys the work. Use every opportunity you have to talk to young people,
particularly in this type of situation. [It’s] a state of mind. It’s not just about the group setting. You’re working with
them all the time. It’s about conscious practice. Dealing with young people wherever you see them.
‘Wherever you see them’ might be in what appears to be a very casual encounter and it may take the form of
spontaneous conversation. In the hands of a skilled and experienced youth worker, conversation is a very effective
tool for learning or support, but it may not look like ‘work’ to an outsider. An awareness of the use of physical space
and positioning and the significance of non-verbal communication is also important.
I think sometimes I must look like I do no work because I am the biggest offender of having young people at the desk
or in that space, it’s like confessions every day. Sometimes I wouldn’t even be looking at the young person I’d be doing
something and they would be rattling away telling me something. Sometimes I have solved the hardest crisis for them
in that time, just sitting there, where they would never bring it up in their youth group or anything because they
would have to announce it in front of everyone, where they would come in and sit behind me and they would tell me
something terrible, maybe they’re in trouble with the police or whatever the issue that day for them is.
In a similar vein, two workers spoke about the importance of conversation with young people and of the need to
retain space for spontaneous interaction. There was some concern that this could be under threat in an
environment where workers have to give an account of the measurable outcomes of their work.
Rachel
I’ve had three brothers in at separate times from the age of eight to eighteen, three brothers
in at different times, just come in today, just to see how things are, just to have a bit of a chat.
Ann
That’s not measurable and I don’t know how you can measure that, I have a problem with the
new youth work message, I came from a youth work setting myself, years ago, as a young
person. Then I went into work in my own community, then I came here. My problem is, I am
terrified that we are going to lose the spontaneity, the relaxation, the feeling of, those people
are too busy, we can’t go in and disturb them.
Yet despite the emphasis on spontaneity and conversation and the recognition of the role of the informal,
the workers were keen to stress that the approach to all aspects of their work should be rigorous and professional.
The same worker who said ‘sometimes I must look like I do no work’ also said the following.
We see ourselves as being professional in the way we approach young people, the fact that we come into work and for us
this is our career, our profession that we have taken on. So for us, it’s important that we plan our programmes properly,
that we work as a team, that we evaluate our programmes and that we are giving the best service possible that we can,
depending on funding and space and other staff, that we can provide for the young people who come through the door.
A manager in another project also emphasised the need for the work to be ‘focused’.
We would have a very clear framework that staff would work with young people, based on identifying the young people’s
needs … their interests, what they want to do, based on the objectives, the outcomes we are looking to achieve with young
people. Staff would plan programmes with clear measures and outcomes and would be supported then to follow through
and to evaluate and share those with young people as well, in a meaningful way not to go in with a list
of objectives … A lot of the outcomes that happen for young people would be small but they would be thought through.
It’s not unfocused.
Being able to take such a focused approach to the work or to work out of a conscious framework of analysis and
action requires that adequate training is provided for both paid staff and volunteers. One volunteer spoke of how
he became aware of the importance of training, having previously thought that youth work was just something that
people were naturally good (or bad) at.
25
PURPOSE
AND
OUTCOMES
OF
YOUTH WORK
I wasn’t sure, but now when you’re going out and you’re doing the training and stuff you can see that some people
are very natural at it, a lot of people like myself need that bit of structure to help them to learn where they’re going
and to think about why they are doing stuff and that. It does seem to help, you go to visit clubs and you see some of
them where, people have taken the time to do the training and they sit down and talk about it and they do their
planning, they have their stuff, they know what youth work is, even if they can’t articulate it as easily, then you go
to some other clubs and there isn’t the emphasis on it … There is a big difference in what the young people get from
those youth clubs. You walk in the door and you see a massive difference between … the experience and quality in
the other.
Judging Success
A key issue for youth workers, and increasingly so in the current policy environment, is the need to be able to make
reliable judgements about the quality and effectiveness of their work, and to communicate this to their peers and to
external interests. There was some unease in the focus groups, as already indicated, with the emerging language of
indicators and outcomes, and a concern that systems based on ‘measurable’ results could lack sensitivity to some of
the most vital and valuable aspects of youth work process and practice.
Mary
I suppose that’s one of the difficulties, something I am not particularly comfortable with.
I think once we start to name like these are the indicators, this is what you want to see … some
youth services will say very strongly if you have a young person on your Board of Directors,
you’ve achieved participation, you know it’s fine. To me, that is not an indicator of any level
of success, it may or may not be a measure.
Ruth
It depends on the starting point as well, where they’re at when they come in.
However there was also a recognition that some explicit framework for gauging effectiveness is essential.
Even from our point of view sometimes personally you are very disillusioned because you don’t know whether you are
actually achieving anything, then you have moments of clarity where it all crystallises and you go thank Lord. But
you can spend time, because you don’t have goals to reach, you can’t tick the boxes, you have nothing like a checklist
to say, this is really working, so you can feel like you’re floundering. That can be a disadvantage from the worker’s
point of view.
Broadly the consensus appeared to be that it is very important to be able to name the successful outcomes of youth
work – for young people, for adults, communities and for society as a whole – but it is not always possible to number
them, in other words to express them in quantitative or numerical terms. There may however be possibilities for
quantifying more of youth work’s outcomes than is the case at present and this is something which workers thought
merits further discussion, perhaps in the context of the Quality Standards Framework. The main thing is that any
system recognises the distinctive nature of the youth work relationship and how it differs from other forms of
practice and provision.
Relationships with Other Services
This raises the question of how youth workers think their own work relates to the work of other professions that work
with young people, and how they think they are perceived by other organisations and services locally and nationally.
For the most part workers believed that they are highly regarded in their communities, and that other professions
respect the particular value which young people appear to place on their involvement with youth workers, but there
may not always be sufficient understanding of what youth work is trying to achieve. Workers also found themselves
called upon regularly to support the work of others.
Mary
The main thing is trying to stop them asking us to join their groups and help them. It’s a real
challenge for us … ‘Will you be on the board, will you be on all the sub-groups, will you get
involved in the cohesion process?’ And we’re like any time we invest in that, is time that we
cannot invest in young people, so that’s our thing … .
Ruth
I think there is a lot of respect for what we do, but maybe there isn’t a complete understanding
of what we do, which can lead to maybe us taking on more than … we have the capacity
to do … .
Mary
[S]ome people … say well [the organisation] is a service provider and we’re not a service
provider, we’re a voluntary organisation who work in partnership with young people or in
partnership with the community.
26
Discussion often focused on relationships with local schools since this is an area in which many projects have
developed partnerships. In some cases the experience was very positive, in others there were tensions.
With individual schools, we have some … excellent relationships, we’ve worked out deals where youngsters come here
for a couple of hours and are at school for a couple of hours. Then we have some schools that we wouldn’t have good
relationships with. We won’t necessarily want good relationships with them. We are open to form a relationship where
we feel it can benefit a youngster. If the school is hiding the fact that it has kids on rolling suspension, things like
that, an outside agency might be seen as a little bit of a threat.
An important part of the youth work process with schools was the way in which young people themselves could be
actively involved in supporting and encouraging other young people who were experiencing difficulty.
We ran a joint [programme] between [placename] and here, which picked up the kids at the end of fifth class, in an
after school project, worked with them right through sixth class, worked with them through that transition … into
first year and continued to work with them in first year. So we were the sort of stable contact with them … some of it
was around improving their own personal skills, in terms of dealing with conflict, or dealing with issues …
[K]ids that are constantly getting suspended because they didn’t deal well with conflict, we tried to work on that …
for those kids with very low self-esteem and then the kids who were already very isolated in the classroom situation
about improving their social skills and maybe deliberately involving them with some of the young people who might
support them in the school system.
Age Groups
One of the few areas in relation to which there were some strong differences of opinion across the different case
study sites was the question of the age group(s) which should be targeted by youth work. In some places work with
younger children is included in the overall programme of the organisation.
We’ve always argued this, that the seeds should be sown for youth work early, because there is a structure around it,
I used to worked very structured with them when they were that young, because that’s what young children need.
Then, as they move on, obviously then you’d [have] less and less structure … I know it’s not considered by the VEC
to be youth work, but I’d argue that point, that it’s right that it should be in there from the beginning, it shouldn’t
be something that you should have only when things go wrong [later].
Another view was that while work with younger children is very important, it is not the role of youth workers to do it.
We have taken the decision that we work with the teenagers, so we work with the kinda twelve to teenager [range],
do you know what I mean? We have a lot of them going into secondary school at twelve, we work on their transition
into the secondary school, that age upwards. To be honest, I think that things pre that age are really about childcare,
not about youth work. I do believe that there is a need for childcare, but I don’t think the youth service is necessarily
the group for providing that.
It seems that in all places, the needs of the younger age groups poses a dilemma for youth workers.
I find a lot of the children that are coming for the youth club are only eight years of age, it’s sad and it’s hard but
you have to actually turn them away … I know there is homework groups and after school groups and things like
that, but there is a big need there, there is a huge gap. If you can get small kids from when they are six years of age
and get them into the system, not get them into a system, but get them that they are not hanging around the shops or
throwing stones at buses or something like that, if you get them in from that age you have more of a chance of keeping
them all the way through.
In general there seems to be an increasing tendency to develop pragmatic responses based on local need, although
one manager cautioned that youth workers should not allow work with younger groups to displace the work with
older teenagers, who might be experienced as more challenging.
[Our age range] is twelve to eighteen … Now that is moving, that is being addressed, that’s being looked at in terms
of what’s been described as feeder clubs, working with the younger age groups, the need and demand for that [from]
the community, from the leaders in the organisation, internally themselves. It just has to be very carefully balanced
that it is not in response to people just finding it very difficult to engage effectively with older teenagers and then
moving the goal posts. That is something we’ve got to be careful about.
27
PURPOSE
AND
OUTCOMES
OF
YOUTH WORK
Rewards and Challenges
What do youth workers find rewarding and/or challenging about their work? For some insights we can return to the
findings from the questionnaire survey. In open-ended questions, workers were asked to identify the aspects of their
work which they found rewarding and those they found challenging (they could identify more than one aspect).
Figure 3.4 summarises the overall findings in terms of rewards. It is clear that young people’s achievements are
experienced as by far the most rewarding aspect for workers: almost two thirds of those surveyed identified this
aspect, with significant proportions also mentioning relationships, young people’s enjoyment and the appreciation
shown by young people to workers. If we look at the gender breakdown (Figure 3.5) we can see that there is a
somewhat different pattern for men and women: young people’s achievements rank even higher among men, being
mentioned by four out of five male respondents, while relationships are mentioned by more than five times as many
women as men.
Percentage of respondents
70
64.1
60
50
40
29.7
30
25
20
12.5
9.4
10
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Response categories (more than one response possible)
Figure 3.4: Main Rewards
80
80
70
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Male
38
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26
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Percentage of respondents
90
Response categories (more than one response possible)
Figure 3.5: Rewards by gender
28
Figure 3.6 provides the overall responses regarding challenges. Behavioural aspects, funding/finances and engaging
young people are significantly more commonly mentioned than any other dimensions. Once again there is a
difference by gender (see Figure 3.7), with five times as many women as men identifying young people’s behaviour
as challenging, and slightly more men than women identifying funding/finances.
Percentage of respondents
30
26.6
25.4
25
22.2
20
15 12.7
11.1
12.7
14.3
14.3
10
6.3
4.8
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9.5
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Percentage of respondents
Figure 3.6: Main challenges/difficulties
40
35
30
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40
Female
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Response categories (more than one response possible)
Figure 3.7: Most common challenges/difficulties by gender
What Makes Youth Work Distinctive?
Finally in this section we consider what aspects of youth work are thought to make it distinctive. Again, the findings
are based on responses to an open-ended question in the survey. Workers were asked: ‘If you consider the type of
work you are involved in with young people and then consider the other services, projects or agencies young people
might have contact with … what would you say makes the work of your project/group distinctive or different?’
As Figure 3.8 shows, the responses are very much in keeping with the views expressed by workers in the focus group
discussions and interviews and outlined above. The most commonly identified aspects, in order of frequency, are:
G
G
Providing a voice and a role for young people (36.5%).
The youth work process (31.7%).
29
PURPOSE
G
G
G
AND
OUTCOMES
YOUTH WORK
OF
Young people’s voluntary involvement (30.2%).
Youth work is needs-based (28.6%).
The youth work relationship (22.2%).
Once again there were some interesting differences by gender (Figure 3.9). Firstly, women identified a broader
range of features than men. Secondly, they ranked all of the top five aspects (above) higher than men did, notably
so in the case of the voice of young people and the importance of relationships (the figure being exactly double in
each case: 40%/20% and 26%/13%). Thirdly, the men in this survey are a lot more likely to identify the nature of
the activities in youth work as something which makes it distinctive (27% as opposed to 15%).
Percentage of respondents
40
36.5
35
31.7
30.2
30
28.6
25 22.2
20
17.5
15
15.9
12.7 12.7
10
11.1
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ps
0
Response categories (more than one response possible)
Figure 3.8: What makes youth work distinctive?
45
Percentage of respondents
40
35
30
25
Male
20
Female
15
10
5
At
Re
la
tio
ns
hi
p
tit Sett s
ud in
es gs
to
Y
YP Pro P
Ad vo ces
lu s
u
Vo lt vo nta
l o lu ry
rg nte
an er
isa s
Vo
t
ic Ac ion
e/ tiv
C
om N role ities
m ee of
un d
ity s-b YP
di ase
m
In en d
clu si
S s on
H oc ive
ol ia ne
ist l i ss
ic m
ap pa
pr ct
oa
ch
O
th
er
0
Response categories (more than one response possible)
Figure 3.9: Distinctive features by gender
Taken together, the findings relating to rewards and challenges and to the distinctive features of youth work might
be interpreted as suggesting that in some respects quite traditional gender differences continue to be reflected in
men’s and women’s perspectives on and experiences of youth work.
30
4.
The Views of Young People
This section summarises the young people’s views of the nature, purpose and outcomes of youth work drawing on
both the focus group discussions and questionnaire survey.
Reasons for Becoming Involved and Staying Involved
In the focus groups, when they were asked spontaneously to identify why they became involved in youth work, why
they stay involved and what they enjoy about it, the young people most commonly identified the social dimension –
socialising, meeting their friends and making new ones – and this was consistently related to the generally
comfortable, safe and relaxing atmosphere of the youth group.
Anna
Why did you come back [after the first visit]?
Kay
It was all friendly and you got to make new friends and you enjoy yourself, it’s not repetitive
or anything, you just enjoy it.
Aoife
The atmosphere was good.
Kay
And the people were friendly, the people that worked with you.
Immediately it is clear that the enjoyment and relaxation are related not just to what happens – the kinds of activities
or programmes that take place – but, crucially, to the positive relationships that exist, both with other young people
and with adults.
Jason
I don’t know why I keep coming back. The people and the atmosphere, it’s all great.
Martin
You feel more secure around your own people as well.
Val
You’re more confident around the people that you know. I grew up with Nadine and Jason,
I only came to know Martin, so I have confidence around them because I know them. When
you’re around people you know, you don’t have to pretend to be someone else.
Jason
If you have any problems you just talk to one of the leaders, because you know them so long.
You know you can trust them.
Based on the questionnaire findings, Figure 4.1 shows that when presented with an open-ended question asking
what they enjoyed most about attending the youth group, by far the most common response related to socialising,
followed by reference to the particular activities or programmes on offer. As the Figure shows, females are even more
likely to mention socialising than males (70% as compared with 58%) but the overall pattern of responses is similar.
70
60
0
Male
40
Female
30
20
10
w
n’
tk
no
le
ou
Do
ng
pe
op
te
rs
/I
T
ac
e
fo
ry
C
in
g
ut
O
om
al
ci
So
pu
s/
Tr
ip
s
g
isi
n
rt
po
up
ls
na
io
Em
ot
Sp
tiv
iti
es
(in
clu
di
ng
Ed
u
ca
sp
o
tio
n
rt)
0
Ac
Percentage of respondents
80
Response categories (more than one response possible)
Figure 4.1: Most enjoyable aspect of youth group by gender
31
PURPOSE
AND
OUTCOMES
OF
YOUTH WORK
Returning to the focus group discussions, it is interesting to note that when young people talk about the
environment being ‘safe’ they often seem to have in mind not so much that it is ‘free from harm’ but that it is
comfortable, somewhere they can be themselves (although of course both aspects are important).
Ciara
[Y]ou feel safe, the environment that you’re in, it’s grand.
Maurice That’s an interesting point, could you say a wee bit more about that, feeling safe.
Ciara
It’s a safe environment, you know like, if you were sitting out on the wall you’d be hassled by
the Gardaí and neighbours to get off the wall and move on or go home or whatever. Whereas
in the club it’s safe, we’re able to chill out, do what we want, in a safe environment.
Susan
And you wouldn’t want to mess, or wreck the place or do whatever, you know what I mean,
not that we …
Cian
At the end of the day it’s your sitting room.
Many of the young people also showed an awareness that a comfortable or ‘safe’ atmosphere is not just something
that comes into being of its own accord: it is something which has to be created and sustained (and therefore is
something which cannot be taken for granted).
Ben
It’s totally professional, yet more casual here.
Gemma Yeah, it’s more casual here, people prefer that … .
Ben
… when you take away the casualness and bring in formality, it changes the thing between
you, that’s what I like about this place, it’s totally casual.
Gemma Whenever there are unspoken rules, they don’t really tell you what you’re not meant to do,
but you just do it. That makes you feel responsible.
This last comment touches on the way in which matters of discipline and decision-making take place in youth work
and how this differs from schools. This was often related by the young people to the question of their voluntary
participation.
Voluntary Participation
It seemed to make a substantial difference to the focus group participants that they had been able to choose to take
part in the youth group. In one case, the young people had been talking about their involvement in creative activities
and arts work.
Anna
What is it that is different that happens here in the youth service than if you went to just an
art group?
Val
Like in school, you have to do it. It’s voluntary participation if you want to do it in the youth
project, they would encourage you to do it, but it’s up to yourself whether you actually want
to do it or not.
Anna
What keeps you coming back?
Val
You have fun and you get the choice whether you want to do it or not. Obviously if you want
to do it, you will come back to do it.
It was suggested more than once that youth workers actively encourage young people to be involved (rather than
passively leaving it up to them).
Maurice Does it make a difference that you can choose to be there or not … how does that make a
difference?
Una
I don’t feel you have to go, but in the youth club if you don’t want to go they’ll ring you and
say are you coming but if you don’t come they’re not going to give out to you. If you have
something else to do, they’re not going to mind whereas in school you’d be in trouble and
they’d be ringing your ma and saying were you coming. It’s more of a choice in the centre,
it’s more relaxed.
32
The contrast with school was particularly likely to be highlighted when the issue of voluntary participation
was discussed.
Debbie … you don’t have to go, that’s what’s good about it.
Maurice Is it very important, that’s the way it is?
Debbie Yeah, it’s good we have an option whether we want to go or not.
Lucy
We have an option of whether we want to go to school or not.
Debbie Yeah, but you don’t get told that if you don’t come on a certain day, if you don’t come on a
certain day here, you’re not able to come anymore. If you don’t go to school for so many days,
goodbye see you later, you’re gone, up in court.
In the questionnaires the young people were also asked what they thought made the youth group different from
school or from a training project (see Figure 4.2). Here the fact that their participation is voluntary was specifically
mentioned by only a small percentage of young people (7.7%), but the closely related theme that there are ‘fewer
rules’ and ‘more freedom’ was identified by almost two in five (37.5%) and the fact that youth work is ‘more fun’ by
three in ten (31%).
37.5
Percentage of respondents
40
35
31
30
25
20
15
10
5
11.3
7.7
10.1
4.8
1.2
8.9
6.5 7.7
3 4.2
0.6 0.6
Pr
ef
er
y
ou
th
w
W orke
e
r
Fe are s to
w
er her tea
ch
e
ru
e
v
le
s m olu rs
n
N
ta
or
o
ho e fr rily
e
m
ew ed
H
el
or om
p
k
w
ith /W
ho ork
m
ew
or
k
M
M
or
or Frie
e
e
nd
fu
L
c
Yo ear hoi s go n
un nin ce
g
g
of ther
is
pe
e
m acti
op
o
v
le
Re
’s re p ities
cr
op
r
ea
in acti
tio Mi
i
ca
x
o
n
ns
o
l
sp
m
ac f yo
at
Fi
u
e
te
ng
nd
fo
r
r
p
sc
ho you eop
ol
ng
le
m
pe
or
o
e
en ple
jo
Do yab
n’ le
tk
no
w
0
Response categories (more than one response possible)
Figure 4.2: How the youth project/group differs from school
Benefits and Outcomes
The young people were asked in both the focus groups and questionnaires what they thought they had gained or
how they thought they had benefited from their involvement in youth work. Their responses broadly correspond to
the views of adults although with some differences of emphasis. They are summarised below under a number of key
themes.
Friends
In keeping with the importance attached to being able to socialise in an enjoyable atmosphere, friends were
frequently the first benefit mentioned (the following contributions were from four different young people).
Friends, I wouldn’t have met any of these, if I wasn’t here. We all met at the bands night. We met around here.
I have a friend who moved down from Dublin a year or so ago and he didn’t really know anyone, so I brought him
here one day and it’s great here because the atmosphere here is like the first day, whenever I walked in it was, hey
what’s up and the first day he came in, ten minutes later he was having a laugh with everyone. So he was up by
twenty friends that day anyway.
33
PURPOSE
AND
OUTCOMES
OF
YOUTH WORK
I suppose you can mix better with a group of people. A lot of people you wouldn’t get to know in your own group,
you mix in … people with different interests and stuff.
Yeah, it’s easier, when I went into college it’s easier for me to interact with new people, because I had been in secondary
school, so I had my set friends, when I came here, meeting new people, it just gets easier and easier to approach
someone and sort of say, hey how are you, what’s your name when I went into college. It gives you better
communication skills.
These comments illustrate the capacity of youth work to enable young people to have a more diverse group of
friends than they might otherwise be able to meet, and in the process to develop skills for interacting in a broader
range of settings, which are both aspects of ‘social capital’, the concept introduced in the first section of this report
and returned to later.
New Activities and Opportunities
It has already been shown that the activities and programmes on offer are among the things that most attract young
people to youth work, and most encourage them to stay involved. But activities and programmes of various kinds are
available in a number of different contexts, so it is important to establish whether the young people think youth work
makes a distinctive contribution in this regard. In the questionnaire, respondents were asked whether they had taken
part in activities in their project or group which they had not taken part in before or would not have been able to
take part in otherwise. Well over two thirds of the respondents (69.2%) answered that they had. When those who
responded positively were then asked what types of activity youth work opened up to them, ‘recreational
programmes’ was the most common category, followed by ‘outings/trips’, ‘new hobbies’, ‘new skills’ and a broad
category of ‘educational programmes’ (as with most of the other questions in the questionnaire, the question was
open-ended and these categories are based on the researchers’ classification of the responses). Figure 4.3
summarises the results and shows that the pattern is very similar for young men and young women.
45
Percentage of respondents
40
35
30
25
Male
20
Female
15
10
5
re
at
sr
et
ig
io
u
w
Re
l
ne
n
ho
ew
s
sk
ill
s
s
ie
bb
m
ra
N
Le
ar
.)
na
lp
ro
g
s(
tio
ea
Re
cr
in
ut
O
m
isc
m
m
e
gr
a
ro
lp
na
tio
ca
Ed
u
gs
/T
rip
s
isi
t
lv
na
tio
ca
Ed
u
m
e
0
Response categories (more than one response possible)
Figure 4.3: New activities by gender
Generally speaking the longer young people in this survey have been involved in youth work the more likely it is that
they have experienced new activities or opportunities. This is shown clearly in Figure 4.4, where just over half of the
young people involved for less than three months gave a positive response, whereas among young people involved
for three years or more the figure is 83%.
34
120
Percentage of respondents
100
80
47
36
29
28
17
50
Have you taken part in
new activities? Yes
60
Have you taken part in
new activities? No
83
40
64
53
50
<3
months
3–6
months
20
71
72
1–2
years
2–3
years
0
6 months
-1 year
> 3 years
Duration of involvement
Note: categories are approximate rather than strictly mutually exclusive.
Figure 4.4: New activities by duration of involvement
Informal and Non-formal Learning
Activities, then, are important in youth work. In fact it is a common perception that youth work is about little more
than activities, a point made earlier in this report. This is also a view which was raised with the young people
themselves in the focus groups, and which for the most part they rejected.
Maurice If somebody said … ah sure all they do in there is run games, run activities, what would
you say?
Orla
I’d say no, well I can’t judge other clubs but from my activities, two groups and the youth café
that I have been involved in, we’ve done loads of work. We’ve done loads of work around the
environment, the playground over in [the local area], one of my groups was really active in
the design of that playground, we went around it loads, we did loads of work against the
ASBOs, loads of stuff, it’s not just fun and games.
It is interesting to note that when the young people described their participation in the youth groups they often
moved effortlessly between ‘activities’ and ‘learning’, as in the following exchange which took place when one of the
researchers asked what made the youth group attractive to them and why they would encourage their friends
to come:
Paul
[There are] games and the big sports hall.
Louise
Football and Eastenders at half seven.
Paul
Play Station 2, cards. You can learn about things like drugs, alcohol.
Louise
They have loads of leaflets on the table and when you’re just sitting there you see them so you
read them and you learn a lot of stuff.
Here the young people themselves showed an awareness of the nature and value of ‘informal learning’: it happens
spontaneously, or at least it appears to. This point was confirmed in another focus group discussion.
Carol
Yeah, you don’t even know its happening, it’s just, you know we learned how to cook and we
didn’t realise it, I just remembered how to do it and rowing and orienteering and aerobics, and
all about the environment, they teach like how important [it is] when all the trees and
everything are getting cut down, they teach you that’s bad and they tell you why it’s bad and all.
35
PURPOSE
AND
OUTCOMES
OF
YOUTH WORK
Anna
But you could learn that in school too. What’s different about how you learn it here?
Carol
It’s more relaxed. In school you have to learn it because you’ll be tested on it and if you don’t
know it you’re in trouble but in this place they’re not going to give out to you.
Ben
It’s more enjoyable that way.
Percentage of respondents
Another young woman in this same focus group captured a crucially important element of the institutional
difference between formal and non-formal/informal education and how it can relate to matters of personal
development and self-esteem when she said that ‘in the Centre you don’t have anything to fail, you don’t have
anything to be bad at’.
The topic of learning was also dealt with in the questionnaire. Respondents were asked ‘Is there anything in
particular you have learned by taking part in the youth group?’. Just under two thirds of the young people (63.9%)
said that there was, with figures broadly similar for young men and women. When asked what it was that they had
learned, more than half (52.3%) of those who had responded positively identified some type of practical skill, as
Figure 4.5 shows, with responses falling into the category of ‘personal development’ and ‘social skills’ also scoring
highly (29.4% and 21.2% respectively).
60
52.3
50
40
29.4
30
21.2
20
7.3
6.4
1.8
s
ue
al
ci
so
ay
Pl
Br
oa
de
n
kn
Us
e
ow
le
le
dg
isu
e
re
iss
or
sp
w
ne
po
e
tim
pa
ity
un
m
om
C
ts
y
el
sit
pa
ci
rti
H
Pr
rs
iv
tio
fu
av
e
sk
al
ac
tic
n
n
s
ill
ill
sk
al
ci
So
on
al
de
ve
lo
pm
en
s
t
0
Pe
7.3
0.9
on
10
Response categories (more than one response possible)
Figure 4.5: What respondents have learned from participation in the youth project/ group
Formal Learning
In addition to its non-formal and informal dimensions, focus group participants also gave many examples of the ways
in which youth work contributes to their success in formal educational terms. Youth workers very commonly act in
a support and advocacy capacity in relation to the formal system. In the following example, it is clear that the youth
worker had acted on the basis of a conversation during a spontaneous ‘drop in’ by the young person: the worker
subsequently followed up on the young person’s school situation as well as getting him further involved in the
youth project.
Maurice Did Peter [the youth worker] come to your house first, to encourage you to come here?
Patrick
Yeah to encourage me.
Maurice How did he know about you or how did he make contact with you?
Patrick
Because I came in just for a day and he asked was I in school, I said no, I was kicked out I
think I was, and I didn’t go for six months and then Peter just got me into school and then
he got me into a load of clubs …
36
A friend of this young man had similarly benefited from the support of another one of the youth workers, who had
advocated on her behalf when she was having difficulty getting on a particular college programme.
Emma
… They help you a lot. They got Patrick back into school, they got me a better course
in college.
We have already seen in the section on youth workers’ views that there are now also cases where youth work projects
and premises may actually go so far as being the direct providers or facilitators of formal educational programmes.
Anna
So to sum up, what would you think is the biggest thing you got from being a member here? …
Colette I’m doing me Leaving Cert here as well, so I wouldn’t have got that. I’d have left it. I’m doing
it with the project now … .
Von
Yeah, things like the FETAC and that like, I wouldn’t have done anything like that, only for
the youth project. Wouldn’t have went to America.
Advice and Information
On a related topic, some focus group participants also drew attention to youth work’s role in providing advice and
information, including advice and information about career options. As in so many other instances it appeared that
the positive relationships they experienced in youth work helped to facilitate this.
Barry
[Youth work] helps you grow up, helps you mature.
Niamh
Helps you find out what you want to do when you leave school as well.
Anna
And you wouldn’t get that in school?
Niamh
I wouldn’t.
Susan
What about career guidance?
Niamh
She can’t stand me, she’s glad to see the back of me she is.
Information appeared to be available about a wide range of topics and issues. In the following focus group extract
it is clear that the young man has no hesitation in identifying several relevant areas.
Maurice Some of you said in your forms that youth workers were good because you could talk to them
about things. Are there particular things that you find you can talk to youth workers about or
get support from them? The law is one, that is one good example, are there others?
Kevin
Drugs, alcohol, sexual health. Responsibilities, relationships, loads.
The young people appeared to agree with the youth workers that the context in which information is provided, and
the relationship between the parties involved, is as important as the information itself.
Positive Changes
The above are examples of ways in which young people think youth work has made a positive difference to their lives
and specifically to their education, development and awareness. More broadly, in the questionnaire survey the young
people were asked whether they could ‘see any changes’ in themselves ‘as a result of being involved’ in youth work.
Overall, more than two thirds of the respondents (67.2%) said that they could, and generally speaking it appears
that after a relatively short period of involvement the young people in this survey are likely to report that they can
see changes. Figure 4.6 presents the responses to this question broken down by duration of involvement, and shows
that while among those involved for less than three months only 40% reported seeing a change, for all other
categories substantial majorities gave positive responses.
37
PURPOSE
AND
OUTCOMES
YOUTH WORK
OF
120
Percentage of respondents
100
21
25
23
37
60
80
Have you seen a change
in yourself? Yes
60
60
Have you seen a change
in yourself? No
40
79
75
77
63
40
40
20
0
<3
months
3–6
months
6 months
-1 year
1–2
years
2–3
years
> 3 years
Duration of involvement
Note: categories are approximate rather than strictly mutually exclusive.
Figure 4.6: Perceived change by duration of involvement
Those young people who reported seeing a change in themselves were further asked what kind of change they had
seen, and the most common category of response was of a type that might be classified as ‘positive personal
development’, mentioned by almost 56% of respondents (see Figure 4.7). One young person noted that he was ‘more
open, not as aggressive, much more positive’ through his involvement in the youth group. Another, closely related
perceived change was being ‘more sociable’ or having ‘more social skills’ (reported by 41%), with one young person
remarking that ‘I am much more comfortable around people I don’t know because of the fact I had to interact with people I don’t
know’. Other responses included being ‘more educated and skilful’ and ‘being more active and healthy’ as well as
perceived ‘positive behaviour change’. Only one respondent noted a negative personal change through their
involvement in the club.
Percentage of respondents
60
55.7
50
40.9
40
30
22.6
20
7
10
8.7
0.9
f
se
l
lls
to
ge
ia
l
ch
an
so
c
e
e
or
tiv
eg
a
N
M
or
e
M
e
tiv
ac
na
rs
o
pe
Po
sit
i
ve
sk
i
th
al
he
d
an
ev
ld
at
uc
ed
e
or
M
y
en
t
el
ed
op
/S
k
ha
rc
ou
vi
ha
be
iv
e
sit
Po
m
ilf
ng
ul
e
0
Response categories (more than one response possible)
Figure 4.7: Type of change perceived
38
Finally it is instructive to explore the relationship between the type of change perceived and the duration of the
young person’s involvement in youth work. Figure 4.8 summarises the pattern. It is notable that the longer the young
people in this survey have been involved, the less likely they are to mention greater sociability as a change they see
in themselves, and the more likely they are to highlight positive personal development. The latter category replaces
the former in frequency of mention as the duration of involvement increases.
80
Percentage of respondents
70
Positive behaviour change
60
More educated/Skillful
50
Positive personal development
40
More active and healthy
30
More social skills
Negative change to self
20
10
0
<3
months
3–6
months
6 months – 2–3
-1 year
years
> 3 years
Response categories
Note: categories are approximate rather than strictly mutually exclusive.
Figure 4.8: Type of change by duration of involvement
Of course the questionnaire can only gauge the perceptions of respondents rather than actual changes over time, and
it does not in any case claim to be representative of all young people involved in youth work, but it might be
tentatively suggested on the basis of these findings that in the early stages of their involvement young people are
most conscious of how youth work helps them to relate to others (overcoming shyness, becoming more outgoing and
so on) whereas later they may come to take these social skills for granted and are more conscious of how youth work
is enabling them to develop as individuals. But of course social skills and personal development are inextricably
linked and not too much should be made of the distinction in any case. The following exchange from a focus group
discussion illustrates this link, and bears out the point made earlier (and returned to later) about the relationship
between youth work and social capital.
Aoife
[You gain] self confidence.
Carol
Self-esteem as well, because when I went to, when I wasn’t involved, I knew people in the area
and like I’d say hello and all. When I joined like I’d stop and I’d talk and I was more confident
to go out. Say people that I would know to see and say hello to, I’d just walk past and say hello,
now I’d stop and I’d talk and I’d be more friendly.
Aoife
And more popular.
In another discussion the positive outcomes identified included learning about both ‘rights’ and ‘responsibilities’
and the insightful point was made that the ability to participate constructively in the focus group research was itself
indicative of valuable learning.
Maurice What’s the one thing, the one way in which you’ve got some benefit or advantage from being
a member of the group, what’s the most important thing?
Kevin
I’ve matured.
Maurice You’ve got more maturity from it?
Kevin
Yeah, I’ve learnt about rights and all, responsibilities.
39
PURPOSE
AND
OUTCOMES
OF
YOUTH WORK
Maurice Is this through discussion, talking to people?
Kevin
Talking to the youth workers.
Niamh
More confidence to talk to people and talk in front of people.
Kevin
For instance now.
Participation
As was evident in the literature review and in the findings of the focus group discussions and questionnaire survey
of youth workers, the active and critical participation of young people has been regarded for many years as a key
element of youth work policy and practice. ‘Giving young people a voice’ emerged as the most commonly cited
‘distinctive feature’ of youth work in the adult survey. This study was also designed to elicit young people’s own
perspectives on the nature of their participation. For most of the focus group participants, it appeared that having
a say in how the group was run, what activities were engaged in and the form that programmes would take, was
almost taken for granted. As was the case for adults, for the young people this was frequently seen as a defining
feature of youth work and part of what makes it different from formal education.
Paul
Well, it’s good that we can make decisions of what we want to do over the next few weeks,
instead of them telling us what we’re going to do and nobody wants it so we all decide and
have a vote.
Kevin
Well if they told us what to do, I reckon there wouldn’t be as many people attending the
group.
Niamh
Nobody would want to go.
Kevin
It [would be] like being in school.
The process of decision-making was commonly described in terms of negotiation. Although the youth workers had
ultimate responsibility for how the groups were run and had to be able to stand over decisions that were taken, the
way they exercised this responsibility was generally seen as fair and legitimate.
Anna
Would you have much of a say in what happens here?
Val
Yeah, if you’re in a group they won’t just say … they will say what do you want to do for the
year.
Joe
It’s fifty/fifty, we meet them half way.
Anna
How did that get worked out, did you have a negotiation with them, they say no you can’t do
it and you keep pushing to do it or what is the conversation like?
Colette It’s not only their point of view, they come and ask you your point of view.
Val
If you can’t do it, they explain why you can’t do it. They just don’t say, you can’t do it and
that’s the end of it, they say we can’t do it for these reasons.
Maurice And you trust them if they tell you it can’t be done for a particular reason?
Val
Yeah.
In some cases the young people’s involvement in decision-making was formalised through members’ committees or
similar fora. This introduces an added dimension and, at least potentially, provides opportunities for learning new
skills relating to group dynamics, roles, responsibilities and authority.
Carol
[J]ust recently we set up our new citizenship committee for this year, so there are ideas being
thrown around there about what we want to do …
Maurice Does it all work very smoothly or do you have the odd argument as to what’s going to happen?
40
Sue
Ah yeah sure, we have an odd argument. There can be some people who disagree about
things and there can be some people playing up at a meeting and you have to tell them to
quieten down an odd time. It’s not that bad though.
Anna
How does that work, do people kind of respect the authority of the committee, because the
committee are all young people?
Sue
Yeah, I’d say generally we do respect the committee, because they’re the ones that are
running the meeting and coming out on Monday night and setting up the agenda. There can
be a few people who do talk during meetings and we just have to tell them [to] be quiet.
Generally, the chance to be involved in making decisions was very highly valued by the young people in the focus
groups – it was regarded as both challenging and enjoyable. As one young woman put it, ‘you feel powerful when
you can do that’. The questionnaire findings also suggest that young people do think they are involved in decisionmaking in youth work. When asked if they had a say in decision-making in their group or project, four out of five
respondents (80.4%) said that they did, and when they were then asked about the nature of the decisions which they
had a part in making, ‘choosing activities’ was the most common response (52.3%), with ‘voicing your opinion’ (in
an unspecified way) and ‘electing a committee/voting’ the next two most common, at 25.8% and 19.7% respectively.
Figure 4.9 summarises the results.
Percentage of respondents
60
52.3
50
40
25.8
30
19.7
20
9.8
10
5.8
3.8
1.5
s
s
le
ru
ur
of
so
re
Eq
u
ip
m
C
ta
en
at
nd
io
n
re
de
g
in
nd
fu
in
ve
d
In
v
ol
ce
ns
ci
vo
d
ol
/H
m
m
co
ct
El
e
sio
te
n
ee
itt
ce
Vo
i
ho
C
yo
os
ur
e
op
ou
in
tin
io
gs
es
iti
tiv
ac
e
os
ho
C
s
0
Response categories (more than one response possible)
Figure 4.9: How young people feel they have a say in the decision-making process
Relationships and Respect
Active participation and involvement in decision-making requires that positive relationships exist between young
people and adults, and this was a further area explored in the research project. A consistent theme emerging in the
focus groups was the way in which friendship is a crucial part of the relationship between the youth worker and the
young person, although the young people differed when it came to determining the extent to which youth workers
were like their other friends. One view (from a young woman in her late teens) was that youth workers are friends
like any other:
I personally don’t see them as older people or leaders or authority, I see them as friends. So I come in and tell them
all about me day, or what I did on Saturday night, and I know they don’t judge, they don’t, they can’t judge you,
they can give you advice or whatever, but they can never judge and you can see that as soon as you walk in and if
you are having a conversation about anything like, you just see them more as friends, than teachers or leaders or
parents. They don’t stand over you and give out to you, they sit down, they’re on your level, they talk to you, they
don’t give out, they don’t dictate anything.
41
PURPOSE
AND
OUTCOMES
OF
YOUTH WORK
More commonly, however, the view was that youth workers were a particular type of friend, or that being a friend was just
part of the relationship, and of just one the youth workers’ responsibilities. As one young woman said: ‘they are your
friend to a certain extent, do you know what I mean, because you can have a conversation, but in school you can’t do
that with a teacher’. Sometimes the young people drew attention to the way the relationship developed over time – a
point also stressed by the adult focus group participants – and to the ‘balancing act’ that is required on the worker’s
behalf.
Joe
[A]t some point you cross the line where they are youth leaders and then they become
friends, and that’s good … .
Jill
But you still have a kind of respect as well for them, because you know, they are our friends
as well, they are only trying to do their job and we understand they wouldn’t ever really give
out to us, but when they tell you to stop doing something, you listen to them more.
Joe
It’s not like a thing that they are angry, just disappointed. They make you feel horrible. You
come in the next week and … .
Maurice But they do have authority then?
Carol
Yeah they do.
Maurice And you recognise that and respect that?
Joe
There’s a line.
This latter point was echoed a number of times in the focus groups: youth workers have a distinctive type of authority
(partly based on the friendship component of their relationship with young people) and/or a distinctive style of
exercising it. The following comments were made by respondents in two different focus groups:
… [T]hey give you advice, I don’t know, they show interest. They show interest in your life instead [of] like telling
like that’s wrong, they give you alternatives instead of going, no don’t do that anymore, they say well maybe you could
do this next time. It is just a different way, it’s a different way it has been … I don’t know, it’s a hard question.
I think they are just there to assist us if we need anything, but generally we kind of don’t. They are there, watching
over us, they’re not like teachers or anything like that, they kind [of] have a more friendly kind of support.
But as important as the youth workers’ ‘friendliness’ in shaping their distinctive authority – and as is clear from some
of the contributions quoted above – is the fact that they are generally perceived to treat young people with respect.
Respect was something which most young people in this study seemed to think operated reciprocally in their youth
group, and it was related to the generally positive attitude which youth workers have towards young people, as
discussed earlier in this report.
Like you’re treated with respect and if you mess you get a warning, in a lot of places you just get thrown out straight
away and you get kicked out from there and you can get barred from here for like a week, and you miss your club
and you come back the week after and you apologise and you’re allowed back in.
Youth Workers’ Roles
The questionnaire survey asked young people an open-ended question about how they would describe the job of
the youth worker. The responses are presented in Figure 4.10, broken down by gender. It is clear that the question
was interpreted in at least two different ways by respondents, some thinking it was asking what the main function of
the worker was (for example to supervise or to organise), others that it was seeking an evaluation of the job (for
example that it is difficult or enjoyable). Nonetheless, the overall pattern is evident: ‘helping’ and ‘caring’ were the
two most commonly cited aspects, being mentioned by more than a third of respondents (35.3%) and one in five
(19.9%) respectively. These are the figures for the overall sample but it is interesting to note that – as Figure 4.10
makes clear – the proportions of young women mentioning these aspects was considerably higher than young men.
42
50
Percentage of respondents
45
40
35
30
Male
25
Female
20
15
10
5
To
T
To
he o h
e
lp
s
yo lp y upe
rv
ou
un
is
n
g
pe g p e
Th
e
op
ey
op
le
ha
ha le
ve
ve
a
fu
ca
rin n
g
To role
ed
uc
To
at
e
o
T
rg
Th
he
an
ey
ir
ha The job ise
ve
ir
It
jo is e
a
is
as
b
l
o
is
a
y
w t of
di
or
ffi
r
e
th
c
sp
w
on ult
hi
s
l
e
Th
ib
c
i
ei
r j om lity
m
ob
itm
is
en ent
jo
y
Do abl
e
n’
tk
no
w
0
Response categories (more than one response possible)
Figure 4.10: Description of the youth worker’s job by gender
In the focus group discussions the role of youth workers was also raised, and the responses were multifaceted,
reflecting perhaps the complex nature of youth work itself but also the fact that ‘youth workers’ can occupy a range
of roles and statuses (for example full-time paid, part-time paid or volunteer, as well as different levels of seniority
or responsibility in some cases). There also seemed to be some ambivalence about the status of youth work as a ‘job’
when compared with other jobs such as teaching. This is of course partly a reflection of the fact that in some cases
the only youth workers the young people would have encountered are volunteer ‘leaders’. The following is one such
instance (‘Pauline’ is a volunteer).
Mary
Yeah, the leaders don’t give out to you, they might say something to you or whatever, but
they’re not like teachers. Teachers are there and have a job to do. The leaders are there and
you have a bit of craic with them, you don’t do that with a teacher.
Pauline Ok [but] we still have a commitment as well, but you need to follow through and get
commitment from the club as well, I think it works both ways.
Even when the youth workers were paid, however, the young people did not always think of their work as a
straightforward ‘job’. There was frequently a sense that the focus group discussion was the first time the participants
had consciously thought about this question.
Lorna
I don’t think of it as much as a job as such, they do put in long hours and they can’t just … I
don’t think they would look at it as a job, like nine to five. They do enjoy it and I’m sure they
get feedback from us as well.
Clare
They do all the activities stuff with us.
Sometimes the distinction between paid worker and volunteer did not seem to have much significance for the
respondents, or it had not previously occurred to them that there was a difference.
Maurice Does it matter if the youth worker is paid or not, do you think? Some youth workers are
there voluntarily.
Kevin
Yeah, they should, quite right they should because it is a job, it’s looking after us. The teachers
are getting paid, why aren’t youth workers getting paid?
43
PURPOSE
AND
OUTCOMES
OF
YOUTH WORK
Maurice But … a lot of clubs or projects have volunteer youth workers as well. What I mean is, do you
find there is a difference in the type of relationship you can have or the type of supports you
can get from the paid workers or the volunteers, or are they more or less the same?
Niamh
People that were volunteering to be in our youth project or whatever, yeah they were doing,
either way they were helping us out, whether they were paid or not paid, they were still doing
the same thing. They should be paid for it.
Some of the respondents explicitly said that they had not previously given much thought to these matters or
generally to the roles and responsibilities of youth workers (as one young man put it, ‘We never really thought about
that’). Others had clearly already reflected on what being a youth worker involves, as the following example shows.
… and the job [is hard] you know, [they] set up youth clubs and do their best for you, if you ask them for something,
[they] do their best for you to get it set for you. We just go in and it’s all set up for us, before we go in they’re working
real hard to get set up and getting people in to teach us different stuff and different football coaches or basketball
coaches and all coming in, they’ve to do all that and we’ve to just go in and enjoy it, they’ve to work really hard
for it.
It is perhaps not surprising that the responses should be so mixed, given that doing youth work involves adopting a
wide range of styles and approaches, some very structured and ‘organised’, others much more informal and
‘spontaneous’. It will be recalled that one youth worker commented that ‘sometimes it must look like I’m doing
nothing’. The young people’s responses confirmed that sometimes it may indeed look like that! Generally, however,
the impression was that the respondents thought youth workers were careful, hard-working, diligent and attentive
in their approach to their work.
Joe
… Some days, it just looks very difficult, it looks kind of stressed. Other days it looks just
relaxed and it looks like they’re doing nothing … .
Val
I think they do more than they actually have to do.
Joe
Yeah, they do more than they should be doing, in a good way, they give more, they offer more
things than they are supposed to maybe.
The Purpose of Youth Work
In the questionnaire survey the young people were asked the following open-ended question: ‘What do you think is
the main purpose of having a youth project/group like this in your area?’. Figure 4.11 presents the findings.
Three closely related categories of response were much more common than any others. The most commonly cited
purpose was that of encouraging positive – as opposed to negative – use of leisure time, including ‘keeping young
people out of trouble’ and ‘off the streets’ and away from drugs and alcohol: helping them ‘to get away from drugs
and the bad ways of life’. This response category was mentioned by more than one third of respondents (36.4%).
Just a few less identified the purpose of providing a recreation space or facility for young people (32.4%). Almost
one quarter (23.9%) mentioned the provision of a place for young people to socialise together. A general purpose
of ‘helping young people’ was mentioned by 15.9% of respondents and smaller but not inconsiderable proportions
mentioned encouraging young people’s participation in the community (14.2%) and providing learning
opportunities (10.2%).
44
40
36.4
Percentage of respondents
35
To help young people
32.4
To develop team spirit
It is a learning opportunity
30
Enjoyment
23.9
25
Socialising
Recreation space for young people
20
To develop social awareness
15.9
14.2
15
To encourage youth participation
in the community
10.2
10
To encourage positive use of
leisure time
6.3
5
2.3
2.3
1.7
Don’t know
0
Response categories (more than one response possible)
Figure 4.11: Purpose of youth project/group
The most commonly mentioned category captures what might be called the ‘diversionary’ perspective, and indeed
the notion that youth work’s main function is to ‘keep young people off the streets’ is as old as youth work itself. The
aim of ‘keeping young people off the streets and out of trouble’ was in fact one of ten aims presented to youth
workers in the adult questionnaire survey and in that context, as part of a varied list, it did secure a mean score
equating to ‘quite a lot of importance’. However, taken on its own it would probably be regarded by most
contemporary youth work practitioners (and probably policy makers also) as somewhat crude and simplistic and as
insufficiently attuned to the many positive and constructive as opposed to diversionary or remedial possibilities of
youth work. It is significant therefore that from the point of view of the young people in this survey it still seems to
carry such weight as a key youth work purpose, being the one they are most likely to mention spontaneously
(whereas the adult responses to a similar open-ended question focused much more on developmental factors).
In a purely pragmatic sense both youth workers and young people often recognise that if it were not for youth
work services there would be ‘nothing else to do’, as the following extract from a focus group illustrates. The first
comment is from a volunteer leader.
Patricia [One purpose is that] with parents they know the children aren’t on the street.
Anna
So it’s sense of somewhere safe for young people to go … If [the club] wasn’t on a Friday
night or a Monday night, where else would you go?
Fiona
Like there is nowhere else for you to go.
Lisa
I feel most people would be hanging around streets, doing nothing really.
Often the young people highlighted the direct ‘diversionary’ impact of the youth group on their own lives.
Sharon … I used to be a troublemaker, but when I started coming up here I stayed out of it.
Anna
And you think just by coming here that’s changed?
Sharon Yeah, it keeps me out of it.
45
PURPOSE
AND
OUTCOMES
OF
YOUTH WORK
Alcohol was often mentioned in the same context as hanging around the streets.
Carol
… If there wasn’t a place to go, the activities weeks and things set up, you’d be doing the same
thing over and over again and you just get sick of it … .
Clare
You’d turn to drink.
Donna
I stopped drinking when I came to the youth centre.
Sometimes the view that youth work helps to prevent, or divert young people from, anti-social behaviour was stated
very bluntly.
Anna
Do you think that if two years ago or four years ago or whatever, if you hadn’t joined the youth
club, I know it’s kind of a hard thing to ask …
Kevin
Ah, we’d run riot.
Anna
Do you reckon your life would be different?
Kevin
We’d run riot.
Paul
I’d say we would, you just don’t know.
Kevin
If there were not youth clubs or youth workers around, there would be total chaos.
More positively however, it is also very evident from the other comments quoted throughout this section that the
respondents do not see youth work as being only about keeping young people off the streets and that they attach
considerable importance to the precise nature of the alternatives provided. The comments of one young man
express very well the way in which youth work creates the space for different – more positive – types of relationship
between young people and adults, based on different assumptions and ‘mindsets’.
[The Centre] is a place to get away from the idea of getting into trouble. It’s just a time … [In other places] if you’re
not doing anything you get kicked out by the guards, security guards or whatever, and here there is none of that.
Universal or Targeted?
The participants in the focus group discussions were asked whether they thought youth work has a ‘universal’ value
for all young people or has special benefits for particular types or categories of young people. The former view was
by far the more widely held.
Clare
I think everyone should [have access to youth work].
Gemma Everyone should try it.
Maurice Some people think youth work is only for young people who don’t get opportunities
elsewhere.
Clare
Oh no, it’s for everyone.
Gemma I used to think that as well.
On the basis of their own experience the respondents also thought that youth work services should be expanded in
the future.
Kevin
Well I hope it’s around in years to come for younger people that are growing up now in the
way it’s helped me.
Aoife
And that they have more than we actually have now, because we obviously do have a lot that
helps us out but it would be even better if say our kids … we want them to be occupied and
to learn new things and to have somewhere to go, rather than sitting out on the streets and
doing what … we’ve done.
46
Promoting Youth Work
Finally, the participants were asked for ideas as to how youth work might be better promoted and its benefits better
communicated. Generally they thought it was not well promoted at present.
Sharon I’d advertise it more, a lot of people don’t know [about it].
Deirdre There’s just only one poster, they look at it and say, I’m not going in there, that’s pure stupid.
The view was expressed that as things stand word-of-mouth contacts and family connections are relied on too much.
Karen
I think you’d need a bit more publicity for it, there is a lot of young people getting into a lot
of crime and going on the wrong path, you’d want to encourage them and make it a bit more,
I’m not saying it doesn’t sound good, just a bit more fun, that this kind of thing is going on
and they’d kind of think of it more.
Maurice That’s a good point, often young people who haven’t participated don’t know really what
it’s like.
Karen
Like if you haven’t really had anyone previously, like older than you in your family, I wouldn’t
have heard of it.
When it comes to persuading people – including other young people but also funders and policy-makers – of the
benefits of youth work, the most common view was that young people’s participation and enjoyment speaks for itself
and would be obvious to any observer who took the time to look.
Clare
Somebody should come to the youth centre and [we’d] put on a show for a week or
something, see what we done … .
Anna
How do you think [people] would know if it was working?
Joe
People coming and they’re staying there and they like it.
47
PURPOSE
5.
AND
OUTCOMES
OF
YOUTH WORK
Youth Workers’ and Young People’s Perspectives Compared
Generally speaking the last two sections suggest that there is considerable correspondence between the views and
perspectives of youth workers and young people on youth work. There is not of course uniformity of opinion even
within either of these groups about most of the issues discussed (there being some noteworthy differences for
example between volunteer and paid workers or between females and males on certain matters), but overall it is
possible to discern something approaching consensus about the nature, purpose and outcomes of youth work.
The Distinctive Nature of Youth Work
Above all it struck the researchers that there is a strong sense of youth work being viewed as something different and
distinctive from other types of provision and practice. This is perhaps not surprising given that the respondents in
this research project were participating voluntarily and may therefore be more likely to include people (whatever
their age or role) for whom youth work has proven to be a distinctively valuable experience. It is important to state
it here nonetheless. Of course what is probably more important is identifying the factor or factors which make it
different or distinctive, since youth work and youth workers are often accused (even by other youth workers!) of
being unable to do so. In this respect too the present research found there to be a strong sense of a shared
understanding. Section 3 summarised the responses of youth workers to an open-ended question about the
‘distinctive nature of youth work’. There was no one dominant response, and perhaps there should or could not be,
but what is striking is the close affinity between the five top categories mentioned. They form an interrelated cluster
of dimensions or aspects – principles perhaps – all of which feature strongly in the literature on youth work as
reviewed in the first section of this report. The five are:
G
G
G
G
G
Providing a voice and a role for young people.
The emphasis on process.
Young people’s voluntary involvement.
Youth work is needs-based.
The centrality of relationships.
All of the other contributions from the youth workers, in both the focus groups and questionnaires, are consistent
with a view of youth work built around these key features. It should also be noted that the features identified
correspond closely to the vision of youth work set out in the National Youth Work Development Plan (Dept of Education
and Science, 2003), all the more so if we take account of aspects not in the top five but also mentioned by
considerable numbers of workers, such as inclusiveness, a positive attitude to young people and the nature of the
activities themselves (see Figure 3.9).
This approach to youth work is also broadly congruent with the accounts given by the young people of why they
got involved in youth work, why they stay involved, what they get out of it and what they think makes it different or
distinctive, although young people’s accounts naturally reflect their perspectives as participants and members rather
than as providers or practitioners, and there are also some differences of expression or terminology. But overall what
the young people describe as happening in youth work, from their point of view, is what the youth workers describe
themselves as trying to make happen.
The Purpose of Youth Work
Throughout the young people’s descriptions and responses there is a strong sense of being there and taking part
because they want to (because it’s fun, friendly, safe, comfortable); of being part of a network of positive
relationships (with a strong friendship dimension in their relations with adults as well as other young people); of
being cared for, cared about, supported and respected (a regularly occurring word) but also challenged and
‘stretched’; of having a say in what happens and how it happens; of being able to point to significant positive changes
in their lives through their involvement; of getting to contribute to the development of other people and of their
communities and of feeling empowered. There is a strong sense therefore of personal development in a community
context – which is exactly the key purpose of youth work as presented by workers.
It is notable however that when young people were explicitly asked what they think the purpose of youth work is
(rather than why they like it, what they gain from it or why they would recommend it to others) they were most likely –
both in the focus group discussions and in the questionnaire survey – to highlight spontaneously (in other words
without prompting from the researchers) what we have termed the ‘diversionary’ dimension, which is very close to
what might be seen as a rather traditional and ‘conservative’ approach to youth work, aimed primarily at ‘keeping
them off the streets’. As we have seen already this aim of youth work is still regarded as important by practitioners
as well. ‘Keeping young people off the streets and out of trouble’ was one of the ten possible aims of youth work
presented in a list of options in the adult questionnaires (Appendix 2) and it ranked strongly overall, particularly
among volunteers (for whom it gained the third highest ranking out of ten, compared with sixth place among full-
48
time paid staff and joint seventh place among part-time paid staff). Overall its numerical score equates to a view that
it retains ‘quite a lot of importance’ as a youth work aim.
However, when asked about youth work’s purpose in an open ended question, youth workers were very unlikely
to mention such ‘diversionary’ aims and much more likely, as we have already seen, to draw attention to personal
development, relationship building, care and community involvement. The fact that young people, in a similar
question, gave much more prominence to the diversionary dimension might be for a number of reasons. It may
simply reflect ‘where they are at’ and their honest assessment of the impact of youth work in their own lives: many
of them explicitly drew attention to the fact that youth work had given them an alternative to negative or anti-social
behavior or encouraged them away from a lifestyle that was harmful to themselves and others, and there was a
common view that youth work provided one of the few safe and accessible indoor spaces for young people to spend
time with friends. It may also be that they pick up more of the language of ‘keeping them off the streets’ from the
workers’ own discourse than the workers are aware or may intend; and it certainly seems safe to say that they are
reflecting what continues to be a dominant understanding of youth work externally in the public eye – and perhaps
to some extent in the ‘policy eye’ too. The introduction of Garda Diversion Projects and the involvement of youth
work organisations in running these projects may in fact have contributed to a resurgence of such a view among both
young people and the broader public, although this is a speculation of the researchers and not something which this
research project was designed to explore, or could either confirm or refute.
Equality and Diversity
In the light of recent policy in youth work (including the National Youth Work Development Plan) and other related
developments in the last few years, one area in relation to which the youth workers if not necessarily the young
people might have been expected to have more to say, and perhaps more to report in terms of practice, is the issue
of equality and diversity. This is not to question the workers’ commitment to equality principles or their valuing of
diversity in itself. When these subjects were raised in the focus group discussions the workers expressed strong views
in support of equality and inclusiveness. Furthermore, one of the ten statements of youth work’s aims in the
questionnaire for workers was ‘To encourage young people to challenge social injustice and inequalities’ and it
received mean scores of just under four (out of five) among all categories of worker – volunteer, part-time paid and
full-time paid – being actually highest by a small margin among volunteers. A score of four means that it is viewed
as having ‘quite a lot of importance’ (see Appendix 2). It may well be that if the statement had been phrased more
directly (from the worker’s point of view) as ‘To challenge social injustice and inequalities’ it would have scored even
higher. However, in the open-ended question about the purpose of youth work, no worker spontaneously couched
his or her answer in equality terms at all. Moreover, while the views of the workers in the focus groups were strongly
in favour of equality and inclusiveness and of recognising and valuing diversity, they also acknowledged in most cases
that practice in this area (or group of areas since equality issues could include all the nine grounds in the equality
legislation and perhaps several others) is not yet as fully or highly developed as it could or should be. Specific
practical difficulties were cited in relation to trying to develop initiatives in some areas including intercultural work
and work that is inclusive of young lesbians and gay men. In all cases the sense is that workers are committed to
developing practice in these (and other) fields and are in some cases already actively doing so but that they
themselves see room for progress.
Benefits and Outcomes
On the key research question of the benefits and outcomes of youth work the correspondence between the views
(and aspirations and intentions) of the youth workers and the perceptions and experiences of the young people was
very strong. As will be clear from the respective sections of this report, both gave very complementary accounts (and,
in the case of the young people, complimentary accounts also) of youth work as a process of non-formal and informal
education with a wide range of positive outcomes at the level of the individual and beyond. These include:
G
G
G
G
G
G
enhanced personal attributes and qualities such as confidence, self-esteem, awareness (personal and social),
amicability and sociability;
opportunities for association with others in a positive context, strengthening bonds with existing friends and
making new ones, often from diverse backgrounds;
new and more diverse experiences and opportunities (which are more likely with longer periods of involvement)
which in turn enhance personal development;
enhanced positive and pro-social behaviour and diminishing negative and anti-social behaviour;
practical skills (for example making decisions, planning and organising, budgeting, cooking, teamwork, group
work, communications, arts and creativity; and numerous sports, games and physical activities);
information, advice and advocacy in relation to (for example) health, relationships, sexuality, the law, careers and
formal education;
49
PURPOSE
G
G
G
G
AND
OUTCOMES
OF
YOUTH WORK
practical support in young people’s engagement with formal education and in some cases direct provision of (and
support for) alternative routes to qualifications;
support for young people’s families by youth workers, integration of family members within the work of the youth
group/project, and more positive approaches to parenting (and to young people in general) by adults involved
in youth work;
improved communications and relationships between young people and adults within communities;
opportunities for practical intergenerational cooperation at local level;
improvement in local conditions and amenities, developing local leadership (among both young people and
adults), cooperation and coordination with other local services which may avoid duplication and facilitate sharing
of learning, resources and approaches.
The youth workers and young people also had very similar views on a number of dimensions or features of youth
work which underpin the benefits and outcomes identified. Two of these have already been mentioned at the start
of this section. These are:
G
G
Young people’s participation in youth work is voluntary.
Positive relationships are at the heart of youth work – both its process and its ‘products’ or outcomes.
The importance of the former (which is part of the legislative definition of youth work in Ireland) was explicitly
affirmed by both adults and young people in this study. The latter point (regarding relationships) was stated
explicitly and emphatically (and often) by youth workers; while among young people it was communicated less
directly but still unmistakably in their comments about respect and friendship and the sheer enjoyment of spending
time with people – both other young people and adults – whom you like and who like you, learning more effectively
as a result.
There also appeared to be broad agreement among youth workers and young people about two other points.
G
Youth work is (at least potentially) of ‘universal’ benefit to young people.
It should not be viewed as being associated exclusively or primarily with certain categories or groups. The value of
having a ‘social mix’ in the composition of youth groups was identified by adults and young people alike.
G
Youth work takes time.
It is only after a considerable amount of time, effort and energy has been invested by youth workers (and of course
by the young people) that the full potential of youth work can be realised (although, as indicated in the literature
review, research shows that it can start to have a significant positive impact on young people and communities even
after a few months). This is also a point that was made very explicitly and frequently by the workers. In the case of
the young people it was made more obliquely or indirectly, as for example when the point was made in the focus
group discussions that the youth worker becomes ‘more like your friend’ after you have known them for a while; or
when the questionnaire findings showed that longer involvement seems to be associated with perceived positive
changes. It is also relevant in this context to note again that the projects and groups featured in this report are all
long established and have a record of many years of service at local level – a crucial factor underpinning the trust
and respect which they are afforded among local adults and other services and agencies as well as young people.
It must be stressed that the above points represent the benefits, outcomes and features of youth work as described
and discussed by youth workers and young people in the five case study sites participating in this study. While the sites
are attached to a number of different organisations, are regionally diverse and also differ from each other in a
number of other significant respects, it is not being claimed that they are systematically ‘representative’ of youth
work in Ireland. The commissioning organisations identified projects and groups which they already hold (and are
held by others) in high regard and therefore the accounts of youth work which we have heard about and have
attempted to communicate in this report are accounts of good practice rather than necessarily of typical practice.
However it is equally important not to assume that practice elsewhere falls short of these standards unless that
practice is also investigated.
50
6.
Conclusion
An earlier chapter in this report reviewed the research literature on youth work and suggested that there is a broad
consensus, in Ireland and elsewhere, regarding some of its key features.
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
It is a process of non-formal and informal education.
It relies on young people’s voluntary participation and commitment.
It is concerned with both the personal and social development of young people.
It can involve a wide range of activities and programmes, but in the case of any or all of these, from a youth work
point of view, the ‘process’ is as important as the ‘product’.
It involves young people as partners, as active and critical participants, and gives them an individual and collective
voice in their communities and in society as a whole.
It rests on positive and mutually respectful relationships between adults and young people.
It has a commitment to uphold core values such as equity, diversity and interdependence; inclusiveness; respect;
partnership; empowerment; safeguarding young people.
It is socially inclusive, in that all young people can participate in and benefit from it; and it takes special care to
support those who have experienced social exclusion.
It provides a means of strengthening intergenerational solidarity and building social capital.
The literature review also suggested that such underpinning values, principles and processes can be regarded as the key
elements of the youth and community work ‘curriculum’: its core statement of purpose and direction, and one which
rather than being narrowly prescribed can find expression in a range of developmental activities and programmes.
The findings from the focus groups and questionnaires documented in the subsequent chapters confirm that (at
least within the case study sites participating in this research) this view of youth work is shared by Irish youth workers
today, and suggest moreover that this view is closely in tune with how young people themselves perceive and
experience youth work, even if they sometimes use a different vocabulary to express their views. The findings also
make it clear that from the point of view both of youth workers and of young people, participation in youth work
has a wide range of significant positive outcomes or benefits, including (as already presented in Section 5):
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
enhanced personal attributes and qualities such as confidence, self-esteem, awareness (personal and social),
amicability and sociability;
opportunities for association with others in a positive context, strengthening bonds with existing friends and
making new ones, often from diverse backgrounds;
new and more diverse experiences and opportunities (which are more likely with longer periods of involvement)
which in turn enhance personal development;
enhanced positive and pro-social behaviour and diminishing negative and anti-social behaviour;
practical skills (for example making decisions, planning and organising, budgeting, cooking, teamwork, group
work, communications, arts and creativity; and numerous sports, games and physical activities);
information, advice and advocacy in relation to (for example) health, relationships, sexuality, the law, careers and
formal education;
practical support in young people’s engagement with formal education and in some cases direct provision of (and
support for) alternative routes to qualifications;
support for young people’s families by youth workers, integration of family members within the work of the youth
group/project, and more positive approaches to parenting (and to young people in general) by adults involved
in youth work;
improved communications and relationships between young people and adults within communities;
opportunities for practical intergenerational cooperation at local level;
improvement in local conditions and amenities, developing local leadership (among both young people and
adults), cooperation and coordination with other local services which may avoid duplication and facilitate sharing
of learning, resources and approaches.
As the list above makes clear, the most obvious benefits of youth work are for individual young people (including
‘concrete’ benefits such as information, practical skills, enhanced educational or employment opportunities; and less
tangible ones such as confidence, self-esteem, tolerance and sociability). But there are also benefits for the adults involved,
both paid staff and volunteers – much the same range of benefits as for young people. There are benefits at the level of
neighbourhoods and communities as well – more positive relationships between old and young, reduced tension, better
amenities or an enhanced physical environment, more coordinated and effective service provision. Furthermore, because
youth work clubs and projects at local level are very often affiliated to regional or national and even international
networks, and because the young people and adults who participate in a youth group carry the benefits of their
involvement with them into many other areas of social action and interaction, there are broader societal benefits as well.
51
PURPOSE
AND
OUTCOMES
OF
YOUTH WORK
For this reason is worth returning to another aspect of youth work introduced at the end of the literature review:
the concept of social capital, which has come to be influential in social policy and public discourse in recent years.
Although he was not the originator of the term, the writer most commonly associated with it nowadays is Robert
Putnam, for whom it refers to ‘connections among individuals – social networks and the norms of reciprocity and
trustworthiness that arise from them’ (Putnam, 2000: 19). Putnam also distinguishes between ‘bonding social
capital’, which strengthens relationships within a given group or category, and ‘bridging social capital’ which
strengthens relationships between different groups (for example ethnic groups, classes, or most relevant here, age
groups). Numerous other sources give definitions similar to Putnam’s: for example the Organisation for Economic
Cooperation and Development defines social capital as ‘the networks, norms, values and understandings that
facilitate co-operation within or among groups’ (OECD, 2001, emphasis added).
Many criticisms have been made of the concept of social capital or of its uses and abuses but these need not
concern us here (see Devlin, 2008; Farrell, 2007). The main point in the present context is that if it is accepted that
stronger bonds of ‘understanding, reciprocity and trustworthiness’ are worth nurturing and sustaining, within
society as a whole and between the major sub-groups which it comprises, then youth work can be seen as having a
vital role to play. Putnam suggests that for the biggest social problems ‘bridging social capital’ is the most urgently
needed but the most difficult to create (Putnam, 2000: 363). Among the biggest social problems facing Ireland in
the future is the key one of demographic change, a greatly increased dependency ratio and the prospect of
significant intergenerational tensions over resources. This point was made in the literature review where reference
was made to the National Youth Work Development Plan which explicitly highlights the increasing importance of youth
work in the context of such demographic change (Department of Education and Science, 2003: 2). Since the
Development Plan was published the country has entered an economic crisis – then entirely unforeseen – which
makes the task of anticipating and countering social tensions such as this all the more urgent.
In terms of positive intergenerational relationships (an example of ‘bridging social capital’) this report suggests that
youth work has a vital and distinctive role to play – one that may in fact have few parallels – given the voluntary nature
of young people’s involvement and the fact that they speak so positively about their relationships with adults and the
mutual respect which they perceive to characterise those relationships. Their views are borne out by the contributions
of the adult respondents, paid and volunteer. Taken together with the other forms of ‘bridging’ documented in this
report (for example in terms of socio-economic diversity or ‘social mix’), these findings suggest that all those concerned
with youth work policy and practice should renew their focus on the social as well as the personal outcomes of youth
work, and on the ways in which the two are inextricably linked, all the more so at a time of unprecedented social change.
52
References
Bloor, M, Frankland, J., Thomas, M. and Robson, K. (2001) Focus Groups in Social Research. London: Sage.
Bryman, A. (2001) Social Research Methods. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Burrell, G. and Morgan, G. (1979) Sociological Paradigms and Organisational Analysis. London: Heinemann.
Canavan, J. (1998) The North Mayo Schools Project. Dublin: Foróige.
Communities Scotland (2006) Delivering Change: Understanding the Outcomes of Community Learning and Development. Edinburgh: Communities
Scotland.
Crimmens, D., Factor, F., Jeffs, T., Pitts, J. Pugh, C., Spence, J. and Turner, P. (2004) Reaching Socially Excluded Young People: A National Study of StreetBased Youth Work. Leicester: National Youth Agency for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation.
Curriculum Development Unit (2003) Youth Work: A Model for Effective Practice. Antrim: Curriculum Development Unit.
De Vaus, D. (2002) Surveys in Social Research (5th edition). London: Routledge.
Department of Education (1980) Development of Youth Work Services in Ireland (O’Sullivan Report). Dublin: Stationery Office.
Department of Education and Science (2003) National Youth Work Development Plan 2003–2007. Dublin: Stationery Office.
Devlin, M. (2008) Review of Youth and Social Capital, edited by Helena Helve and John Bynner. Youth Studies Ireland, 3 (1): 80-82.
European Commission (2009) An EU Strategy for Youth – Investing and Empowering. Brussels: European Commission.
European Knowledge Centre for Youth Policy (EKCYP) (2008) Glossary. Strasbourg: Council of Europe/European Commission.
http://www.youthpartnership.net/youth-partnership/glossary.html
Farrell, C. (2007) 'Thinking Critically about Social Capital', Irish Journal of Sociology, 16 (2): 27–49.
Government of Ireland (1985) In Partnership with Youth: the National Youth Policy. Dublin: Stationery Office.
Government of Ireland (1995) Charting Our Education Future: White Paper on Education. Dublin: Stationery Office.
Hurley, L. and Treacy, D. (1993) Models of Youth Work: A Sociological Framework. Dublin: Irish Youth Work Press.
Lauritzen P. (2006) ‘Youth Work’, Internal Working Paper. Strasbourg: Council of Europe.
Lozano, M.A. and Etxebarria, I. (2007) ‘Tolerance of Diversity in Adolescents and its Relationship with Self-esteem, Empathy and the Concept of
Human Being’, Infancia Y Aprendizaje, 30 (1): 109-129.
Merton, B., Payne, M., and Smith, D.,(2004) An Evaluation of the Impact of Youth Work in England. Research report 606. Nottingham: Department
for Education and Skills.
Miles, M.B. and Huberman, A.M. (1994) Qualitative Data Analysis (2nd edition). California: Sage.
National Youth Council of Ireland (1994) Towards the Development of a Comprehensive Youth Service. Dublin: NYCI.
National Youth Policy Committee (1984) Final Report (Costello Report). Dublin: Stationery Office.
OECD (2001) The Well Being of Nations: The Role of Human and Social Capital. Paris: Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development.
Ord, J. (2007) Youth Work Process, Product and Practice: Creating an Authentic Curriculum in Work with Young People. Lyme Regis: Russell House
Patton, Michael Quinn (2002) Qualitative Research and Evaluation Methods (3rd edition). London: Sage.
Putnam, R. (1995) 'Tuning In, Tuning Out: The Strange Disappearance of Social Capital in America', PS: Political Science and Politics, 28: 664:683.
Putnam, R. (2000) Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Scottish Government (2008a) Identifying and Quantifying the Outcomes of Community Learning and Development: Developing and Testing of a Research
Instrument. Edinburgh: Scottish Government.
www.scotland.gov.uk/learningconnections
Scottish Government (2008b) Building Connections, Getting Involved: Measuring Social Capital Outcomes of Community Learning and Development.
Edinburgh: Scottish Government. www.scotland.gov.uk/learningconnections
Sotelo, M.J. (2000) 'Individual Differences in Political Tolerance among Adolescents', Social Behaviour and Personality, 28 (2): 185–192.
Spence, J. (2007) ‘What Do Youth Workers Do?: Communicating Youth Work’, Youth Studies Ireland, 2 (2): 3–18.
Spence, J. and Devanney, C. (2006) Voices of Practice: A Research Report by Durham University and Weston Spirit. Leicester: National Youth Agency.
Youth Council for Northern Ireland (1998) Benefits of the Youth Service: A Study of the Experiences of 14-18 Year Old Members of Registered Youth Groups
in Northern Ireland. Belfast: Youth Council for Northern Ireland.
Youth Service Liaison Forum (2005) Strategy for the Delivery of Youth Work in Northern Ireland. Belfast: Department of Education for Northern Ireland.
53
PURPOSE
AND
OUTCOMES
OF
YOUTH WORK
Appendix 1
Methodology
This research set out to explore the nature, purpose and outcomes of youth work in Ireland today. It was decided at
the outset by the researchers and the Interagency Group that the research objectives could best be achieved by a
combination of qualitative and quantitative methods, involving semi-structured interviews, focus groups and a
questionnaire survey. It was also agreed that the research would be of most use to the broader youth work sector if
it engaged in a close examination of projects or groups that were well established and known to have a track record
of effective and successful practice, rather than a study of what is necessarily typical or 'representative' of current
youth work in Ireland. This suggested a case study approach, aimed at providing 'well grounded, rich descriptions
and explanations of processes occurring in local contexts' (Miles and Huberman, 1994: 15). Five case study sites
were identified, reflecting the composition of the Interagency Group and also including a range of types of provision
and context (community-based project, local youth service, volunteer-led youth group, urban and rural settings). In
social research terms this is an example of 'purposive sampling', a type of 'non-probability' sampling in which cases
are selected deliberately on the basis of certain known attributes rather than on a randomized basis ('probability
sampling') (De Vaus, 2002). Section 1 of this report has already listed the five case study sites, the youth
groups/projects and the organizations with which they are associated:
G
G
G
G
G
Blanchardstown, County Dublin (Blanchardstown Youth Service, Foróige);
Ennis, County Clare (Clare Youth Services, Youth Work Ireland);
Loughglynn, County Roscommon (Loughglynn Foróige Club);
Rialto, Dublin 8 (Rialto Youth Project, CDYSB)
Ronanstown, County Dublin (Ronanstown Youth Service, CYC).
Within each of the case study sites, and as indicated above, a number of methods were used. Firstly, semi-structured
interviews with key informants (managers and/or senior practitioners) were used to contextualise the research,
gather general background information and explore informants' perceptions of the nature of their work, its
relationship with other types of work with young people and the basis on which they make judgments about its
success or effectiveness. There were nine interviewees in total across the five case study sites: two individual
interviews, two groups of two and one group of three.
Secondly, focus groups were held with youth workers and with young people. Focus groups are favoured in social
research when a relatively 'natural' setting is considered advisable and where it is expected that the group process
might itself help to generate relevant data and insights, although careful moderation is required to ensure that all
group members are facilitated in contributing their views (Bloor et al., 2001; Bryman, 2001). In the case of adults,
as many workers as were available (paid and volunteer) were invited to participate; in the case of young people the
youth worker(s) provided information about the research project and sought volunteers, offering further
encouragement in some cases to try to ensure a balance of age or gender. Specific ages are not indicated in the body
of this report but the young people were asked to state their age at the start of the focus groups and participants
tended to cluster around the mid-teens. In total there were 33 adult focus group participants and 41 young people.
While focus group research has many advantages it also has limitations. In order to gather more comprehensive data
at the level of individual young people and youth workers (demographic information, part-time/full-time/volunteer
status of workers, duration of young people's involvement and perceived benefits, strength of agreement or
disagreement with specific attitudes or opinions, and so on) and tentatively explore the relationship between certain
variables (for example duration of involvement and perceived benefits) it was decided to conduct a questionnaire survey
within each case study site, going beyond the focus group membership. Appendices 2 and 3 provide copies of the
questionnaires. These were distributed by the key informants among all young people and adults in each site and
responses were invited and encouraged, but participation was entirely voluntary. In some cases existing sessions or
meetings were used to facilitate completion. In total there were 64 completed responses from adults and 172 from young
people. Since the questionnaires were circulated within five case study sites that had been 'purposively' sampled and
furthermore since the distribution and collection of questionnaires within each site took a form which social researchers
would call 'convenience sampling' (De Vaus, 2002) it is important to reiterate the point that the questionnaire findings
(like the research findings more broadly) make no claim to being representative of the Irish youth work sector in
general. They do however provide insights into the attitudes and experiences of selected groups of young people and
youth workers and certainly suggest lines of enquiry for further research, both qualitative and quantitative.
The research methods generated both qualitative and quantitative data. Qualitative data from the semistructured interviews and focus groups were subjected both to 'inductive analysis' which sought out 'indigenous'
categories within the responses (Patton, 2002) and 'deductive analysis' which related the views of respondents to
54
categories and themes suggested by the literature review and by discussion between the researchers and the
Interagency Group. In communicating the attitudes and experiences of respondents in this report a strong emphasis
is placed on verbatim quotation - 'Description and quotation provide the foundation of qualitative reporting'
(Patton, 2002: 503) - but within an interpretative framework drawing on contemporary youth work literature, theory
and practice.
In the questionnaire survey most questions were open-ended and therefore also resulted in qualitative data (see
Appendices 2 and 3). In most cases the researchers conducted a thematic analysis (as just described) and classified
the responses so that they could be treated as quantitative data for the purposes of generating simple descriptive
statistics. A small number of questions were quantitative by design. These included the questions seeking
demographic information, status of workers (part-time paid/full-time paid/volunteer), frequency of young people's
attendance and duration of their involvement. They also included - in the questionnaire for youth workers - a 'Likert'
question with a list of ten statements of possible aims for youth work. The full question is included in Appendix 2
and the results are referred to in Sections 3 and 5 of this report, where the findings for the full list of ten items are
collapsed into five broader categories. The following is a list of the five categories and the two statements from the
original list which relate to each category.
Traditional 'character-building' aims:
(i) To teach young people to respect authority.
(e) To keep young people off the streets and out of trouble.
Aims focused on the care and welfare of young people:
(d) To meet young people’s basic need for shelter and nourishment.
(h) To provide individual care and support for troubled young people.
Personal development aims:
(b) To help young people to become more confident, assertive and independent.
(g) To develop young people’s talents, abilities and interpersonal skills.
Social education aims:
(a) To enable young people to become more active and critical participants in their communities and in society
(c) To raise young people’s social and political awareness and empower them to make things happen.
Aims concerned with promoting social change:
(f) To encourage young people to challenge social injustice and inequalities.
(j) To work with the younger generation to promote social change.
Input and analysis of the questionnaire data was conducted using SPSS (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences)
software.
Finally, all respondents to this research project took part on the basis of informed consent (in the case of the
young people all were existing members/participants in the youth groups in question) and all were assured of
anonymity and confidentiality in the reporting of the findings. Excerpts from interviews and focus groups are not
attributed to individual case study sites and all names are pseudonymous.
55
PURPOSE
AND
OUTCOMES
OF
YOUTH WORK
Appendix 2
Questionnaire for Youth Workers and Leaders
Note: This questionnaire is anonymous and confidential and the comments in it will not be attributed to any one person.
Thank you for taking the time to complete it.
Q 1.
Please complete the following 3 statements in your own words:
1(a)
In my own opinion, the key purpose of my work with young people is...
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
1(b)
If I had to choose, the one thing that I would most like young people to gain from my involvement with them is …
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
1(c)
The one activity which I find most effective in helping to fulfil the purpose of my work with young people is …
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
Q 2. The following is a list of statements of possible aims for youth work. How much importance would you attach
to each of these aims in your own work? (Please circle the number which applies in each case.)
1 = none at all 2 = hardly any
3 = some 4 = quite a lot 5 = a great deal 6 = don’t know/not sure
(a) To enable young people to become more
active and critical participants in their
communities and in society.
(b) To help young people to become more
confident, assertive and independent.
(c) To raise young people’s social and political
awareness and empower them to make
things happen.
(d) To meet young people’s basic need
for shelter and nourishment.
(e) To keep young people off the streets and
out of trouble.
(f) To encourage young people to challenge
social injustice and inequalities.
(g) To develop young people’s talents, abilities
and interpersonal skills.
(h) To provide individual care and support
for troubled young people.
1
2
3
4
5
6
1
2
3
4
5
6
1
2
3
4
5
6
1
2
3
4
5
6
1
2
3
4
5
6
1
2
3
4
5
6
1
2
3
4
5
6
1
2
3
4
5
6
56
(i) To teach young people to respect authority.
(j) To work with the younger generation to promote
social change.
Q 3.
1
1
2
2
3
3
4
4
5
5
6
6
What are the positive outcomes for young people of being involved in your youth project/service?
(Please mention what you think are the two or three most significant outcomes.)
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
Q 4.
What is/are the main challenge(s) or difficulty(ies) that you face in your work with young people?
(Please mention one or more)
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
Q 5.
What is/are the aspect(s) of your work that you find most rewarding? (Please mention one or more)
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
Q 6.
If you consider the type of work you are involved in with young people and then consider the other services,
projects or agencies young people might have contact with (e.g. schools, sports groups, health services,
justice services, commercial leisure etc), what would you say makes the work of your project/group
distinctive or different? (Please mention one or more things.)
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
Q 7.
Finally, please provide the following information.
(a) Are you (please tick) male
or female
?
(b) Is your age group (please tick):
less than 20
20–29
30–39
40–49
50–59
60–69
70+
?
(c) Which of the following best describes the nature of your involvement in youth work?
(please tick one only)
Volunteer
Part-time paid
Full-time paid
?
Once again, many thanks for your time and help with this research project.
57
PURPOSE
OUTCOMES
AND
OF
YOUTH WORK
Appendix 3
Questionnaire for Young People
Note: The findings of this questionnaire will only be used in a general way and comments will not be attributed to any
named individual. Thank you for taking the time to complete it.
Q 1.
What age are you? ______ years
Q 2.
Are you (please tick a box) male
Q 3.
Roughly long have you been involved in this youth project/group (please tick one only)?
Less than 3 months
1–2 years
Q 4.
3–6 months
2–3 years
or female
?
6 months – 1 year
More than 3 years
How often do you come to the youth project/group?
(tick whichever comes closest)
Most days
2 or 3 times a week
Once a week
Q 5.
Once every couple of weeks
About once a month
Less than once a month
What do you most enjoy about coming to the project/group?
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
Q 6.
Have you taken part in activities in the project/group which you had not done before or would not have
been able to do otherwise?
Yes
No
If yes, please give an example(s). (If no, move on to next question)
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
Q 7.
Do you see any changes in yourself as a result of being involved in club/project?
Yes
No
If yes, can you say what change(s) you have seen? (If no, move on to next question)
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
58
Q 8.
Is there anything in particular you have learned while taking part?
Yes
No
If yes, can you give an example or two? (If no, move on to next question)
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
Q 9. What do you think is the main purpose of having a youth project/group like this in your area?
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
Q 10. What do young people who are not in the project/club think of it?
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
Q 11. Do young people have a say in decision-making in the project?
Yes
No
If yes, please give an example(s) of how they have a say. (If no, move on to next question)
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________________
Q 12. How do you think the youth project/group is different from school or a training project (e.g. Youthreach)?
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
59
PURPOSE
AND
OUTCOMES
OF
YOUTH WORK
Q 13. How would you describe the job of the youth worker/youth leader in the project/group?
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
Q 14. If you wanted to persuade somebody else your age to join the youth project/group, what would you say to
them?
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Q 15. If you wanted the Government to provide more youth projects like this and give more funding to them, what
would you say about the benefits of projects like this?
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Many thanks again for your time and help!
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